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Thundarr the Barbarian (Ruby-Spears Productions/ABC, October 4, 1980 – October 31, 1981) Thundarr the Barbarian (21 episodes; 1980-81)

Created by Steve Gerber (Howard the Duck; The Defenders).

The look of the main characters was designed by Alex Toth. After he was unavailable to continue working on the series, Jack “King” Kirby was brought in, at the recommendation of Gerber and Mark Evanier (who would later write a biography of Kirby). Kirby designed the look of most of the villains and supporting characters.

What is it?

What is it?? Lords of Light, it’s awesome, is what it is!

It’s an animated series that aired on ABC on Saturday mornings between 1980 and 1981. It aired in reruns on NBC in 1983.

Created in part by the legendary Jack Kirby and Alex Toth, it brought a Conan-style barbarian warrior to a distant, post-apocalyptic future, teamed him with a sorceress and a monstrous ally, and pitted the trio against all sorts of menaces that combined super-science and sorcery.

Thundarr’s companion Ookla Noteworthy

The show is worth it just for the character designs by Toth and Kirby. Warriors, wizards, mutants and monsters all clash amid the crumbling remains of our own civilization.

The network insisted Gerber include a monstrous Wookie-like ally for Thundarr. Gerber reluctantly agreed, but needed a name for the character. When he and writer Martin Pasko went to dinner in the Westwood area of Los Angeles, Pasko looked up at the front gates of the UCLA campus and suggested the name “Ookla.”

Thundarr The Barbarian issue 1, by Jason Aaron and Kewber Baal (Dynamite Entertainment, February 4, 2026)

As of 2026, there’s a new Thundarr comic book being published by Dynamite Entertainment, featuring various artists and written by Jason Aaron (Avengers; Conan).

Cartoon Network aired the show in the 1990s. The complete series was released on DVD and Blu-ray home video as recently as 2021.

The world of Thundarr the Barbarian Quick and Dirty Summary

The opening credits of each episode present us with an origin story for Thundarr’s world, but not so much for the character himself.

The world is our own, two thousand years in the future, after a “runaway planet” (likely a comet) tears our moon in half and brings down Earth’s civilization. We are left with a world of super-science, sorcery, and savagery.

Thundarr breaks free of the slave pens and somehow acquires the “fabulous Sunsword,” enabling him to go toe-to-toe with the mightiest monsters and evil beings. Teamed up with his allies, Ookla the Mok (a furry, savage beast, in the Chewbacca mold) and Princess Ariel (a sorceress who never reveals much of anything about her past), they travel across the wrecked remains of Earth, battling evil at every turn!

Thundarr the Barbarian Fantasy/SF/Sword and Sorcery Elements

Because the show is set in the far future, after a massive, worldwide catastrophe, it is able to blend elements of science fiction (flying vehicles, lasers, and so on) with more traditional elements of fantasy and magic. The result is a particularly appealing type of Sword & Sorcery, in which the familiar tropes of the genre stand side-by-side with the ruins of contemporary settings and futuristic characters and weapons, in a sort of goulash of everything that’s cool.

There’s a proud tradition in Sword & Sorcery of that one really extra-cool weapon in a story, from the famous sword Excalibur (as in Excalibur and other films) to the Glaive (Krull) to the awesome, three-bladed rocket-sword we discussed previously (The Sword and the Sorcerer). Thundarr has just such a weapon: “the fabulous Sunsword.” We never learn exactly where he acquired it, but it’s a hilt that generates an energy blade, and is remarkably similar to the lightsaber of Star Wars. It also magnetically attaches to his wristband for easy transport when he’s not using it to hack giant rat-men to pieces.

Thundarr’s fabulous Sunsword

Thundarr’s two companions are familiar Sword & Sorcery archetypes. Princess Ariel is able to cast all sorts of offensive and defensive spells, and Ookla is a mighty warrior who needs no weapons to wreak havoc on his enemies (or on helicopters, when he gets frustrated trying to fly one). All three heroes ride horses, though Ookla’s is alien in appearance and is called an “equort.”

Thundarr and company confront a wide variety of foes familiar to all sword and sorcery fans. There are mutated humanoid rats and lizards, giant monsters, werewolves, and a number of colorful wizards and sorcerers. There’s even an alien monster in the mold of The Thing! (Think Kurt Russell, not Ben Grimm.)

The intermingling of these fantasy elements with the technology of post-apocalyptic science fiction makes for an irresistible combination.

Thundarr the Barbarian, Episode 1: “Secret of the Black Pearl” High Point

For me, the high point of the series is the premiere episode, “Secret of the Black Pearl,” in which Thundarr’s team clashes with the villain called Gemini.

One thing that perhaps held this show back a bit was its lack of an iconic recurring villain. Gemini had the potential to be that, and he did make a second appearance later in the series.

The two faces of Gemini

He is such a perfect Jack Kirby villain, and a perfect Thundarr foe. He wears a sort of combination space-suit and Medieval armor that would let him fit in at a New Gods or Eternals family reunion. Beneath his space helmet, his face is exposed. Normally, it’s a benign face; perhaps even jolly.

But when he’s angered, his entire head swivels around 180 degrees and a different visage is revealed: One with burning red eyes that fire energy beams! Gemini embodies the “super-science meets sorcery” idea arguably better than anyone else on the show. And nobody conveys such scorn for his opponent as Gemini, when he addresses Thundarr as, “BARBAAAARIAN!!”

Thundarr the Barbarian: The Complete Series (Warner Archives, April 6, 2021) Low Point

All of the episodes are written primarily for a younger audience. So, while the series is of very good quality compared to most of the shows that aired on Saturday mornings during that era, they still lack a bit in terms of stories. The potential is tremendous, but the show mostly fails to live up to the very heights it was clearly capable of reaching.

The fashionable villains of Thundarr the Barbarian Standout Performance

Robert Ridgely, a “that guy” actor who appeared in nearly everything over the years, provided the voice of Thundarr, unleashing famous catchphrases such as “Demon Dogs!” “Lords of Light!” and of course, “Ariel–Ookla–RIDE!!”

With his supremely heroic voice, Ridgley also played the title character in the fantastic 1979 animated New Adventures of Flash Gordon series.

Nellie Bellflower voiced Princess Ariel, as well as a number of other female characters.

The road goes ever on Overall Evaluation as a Movie and as Fantasy/SF/Sword & Sorcery

It’s not a movie, but Thundarr the Barbarian is as Sword & Sorcery as you can get. The genre comes in a number of sub-forms, and I’d call this one the “post-apocalyptic fantasy world” variety, where you’re as likely to encounter a giant, sorcery-animated Statue of Liberty as a werewolf or a rat-man.

Blackthorn Thunder on Mars, edited by Van Allen Plexico (White Rocket Books,‎ November 26, 2011)

For a Saturday morning cartoon, the writing is surprisingly intelligent and clever. It’s unfortunate they never gave us more backstory to the characters, but that was a common thing among TV shows and cartoons of that era: Minimal information to get us up to speed, and then off we go.

Unfortunately, we never did encounter those danged Demon Dogs!

Van Allen Plexico once edited an anthology of tales set in a Thundarr-style post-apocalyptic future of super-science and sorcery, called Blackthorn: Thunder on Mars. He is a member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA), a Grand Master of Pulp Literature (2025 class) and a multiple-award-winning author of more than two dozen novels and anthologies, ranging from space opera to Kaiju to crime fiction to superheroes to military SF. Find his works on Amazon and at www dot Plexico dot net.

It’s mid-May, and I’ve been in something of a hardboiled mood lately. So with Summer looming, here’s a Black (Gat) in the Hand. More Pulp is coming, like a gumshoe with a gasper and a rod.

I am fortunate to be part of a star-studded roster of writers who provide intros to Pulp reprints from Steeger Books. More and more classic, and forgotten, Pulp is continually being brought back to print – and electronically as well. I just finished my tenth intro, and that will roll out with number eleven, later this year.

Below you can find links to all nine of the intros that have been printed so far. Plus a bonus one that didn’t quite make it. If you like what I had to say, you might be interested in checking out the books themselves. You’ll likely recognize at least a couple of the names below. But I cannot praise the Max Latin stories by Norbert Davis, enough. I have the audiobook, and that’s my bedtime listening multiple times a week, all year long. Love those stories.

FAST ONE (Paul Cain)

Lead Party has all of Paul Cain’s short stories, as well as his lone novel, Fast One. Mine is one of five essays in this deluxe hardback. And I got to write about Fast One!

Raymond Chandler referred to it as “some kind of high point in the hardboiled manner.” I think this is a nearly flawless book, and it rivals The Maltese Falcon as my favorite Hardboiled novel. If you haven’t read it, you’re missing out on one of the best works in the genre.

PETER KANE (Hugh B. Cave)

My first intro for Steeger covered the six Peter Kane stories. Kane worked for Boston’s Beacon Agency. He was big, and the closest he got to sober was dry drunk. Other ‘hard-drinking’ Pis are pikers compared to him.

Cave was a master of Weird Menace, but only one of the stories ventured down that path. Maybe a little odd here or there, but Cave knew how to write ‘straight’ hardboiled, and I think Kane was hist best example.

MAX LATIN (Norbert Davis)

I’ve said many times, if there was a Norbert B. Davis fan club, I’d probably be the President of it. And his Dime Detective stories about a shady PI who operates out of a restaurant booth, are in my Top Five mystery series’. John D. MacDonald’s last paid work was a cranky intro to these stories. I was thrilled to write a new one – ‘replacing’ my favorite writer from any genre.

These stories have humor, but fall short of screwball comedy. And the cast of characters make these very re-readable. HIGHLY recommended.

BEN SHALEY (Norbert Davis)

This is the first collection of Black Mask stories from Davis – including his Ben Shaley tales. These are mostly ‘straight’ stories, with only glimpses of the humor that Davis was known for.

There were only two Shaley stories, which is a shame. Davis definitely could have had an ongoing series in Black Mask with him. Raymond Chandler said that “Red Goose” impressed him more than any other tale he read when he decided to become a hardboiled writer.

MR MADDOX VOL 3 (T.T. Flynn)

I jumped in late for this series. Mr. Maddox is a bookie, making the rounds of the thoroughbred racing circuit each year. He regularly runs across a murder, and bad guys push him into going up against them. He essentially functions like your typical private eye. It’s neat to get an inside look at the horse-racing world of the forties.

These are long stories – legitimately novella length. They are not quick reads like most of the short stories I do intros for. But by using a horse track bookie, they stand out from the more common PI/cop/reporter tales.

CONTINENTAL OP – VOL 1 (Dashiell Hammett) CONTINENTAL OP – VOL 2 (Dashiell Hammett) CONTINENTAL OP – VOL 3 (Dashiell Hammett)

Steeger is reprinting every Continental Op story from Hammett. The short, fat, honorable – and unnamed – private eye for the Continental Detective Agency, showcases the best of Hammett. And Red Harvest (which will be covered in Volume 4) is right up there alongside Fast One for hardboiled action.

CASS BLUE – VOL 2 (John Lawrence)

In between his Dime Detective series’ Sam Beckett, and the Marquis of Broadway, the prolific thirties Pulpster wrote about tough guy Cass Blue. Though there was something of an Agatha Christie ‘country manor’ vibe to several of the stories. It was a bit of a change up for Dime Detective readers.

MIKE & TRIXIE (T.T. Flynn)

So, I missed the deadline for the first Mike & Trixie book from Steeger (there have been three so far). I ended up with a homeless intro, so I posted it here at Black Gate. Click on over. You can be one of the very few people on the planet to have read it.

Though that applies to quite a few things I’ve written.

It’s gonna be another Summer of Pulp, and I’m hoping to have a Frederick Nebel surprise in the Fall. Next up, maybe I’ll dig a little deeper into Rex Sackler. I wrote a post after having only read one story. I like him even more after finishing off Volume 1 from Steeger.

We’re a hundred-ish years into Pulp, and I still enjoy reading it. So do a lot of folks I know. Look at the links below, and check out an essay or two written by myself, and some friends. The Pulp world lies at your feet.

Prior Posts in A (Black) Gat in the Hand – 2025 (12)

Will Murray on Dash(iell Hammet) and (Lester) Dent
Shelfie – Dashiell Hammett
Windy City Pulp & Paper Fest – 2025
Will Murray on Who was N.V. Romero?
Conan – The Phoenix in the Sword in Weird Tales
More of Robert E. Howard’s Kirby O’Donnell
More Weird Menace from Robert E. Howard – Conrad and Kirowan
Hardboiled Gaming- LA Noire
Western Noir: Hell on Wheels
T.T. Flynn’s Mr Maddox
Dashiell Hammettt’s The Scorched Face (my intro)
Will Murray on Raymond Chandler’s Other Lost Stories?

Prior Posts in A (Black) Gat in the Hand – 2024 Series (11)

Will Murray on Other Lost Raymond Chandler Stories?
Will Murray on Dashiell Hammett’s Elusive Glass Key
Ya Gotta Ask – Reprise
Rex Stout’s “The Mother of Invention”
Dime Detective, August, 1941
John D. MacDonald’s “Ring Around the Readhead”
Harboiled Manila – Raoul Whitfield’s Jo Gar
7 Upcoming A (Black) Gat in the Hand Attractions
Paul Cain’s Fast One (my intro)
Dashiell Hammett – The Girl with the Silver Eyes (my intro)
Richard Demming’s Manville Moon
More Thrilling Adventures from REH

Prior Posts in A (Black) Gat in the Hand – 2023 Series (15)

Back Down those Mean Streets in 2023
Will Murray on Hammett Didn’t Write “The Diamond Wager”
Dashiell Hammett – ZigZags of Treachery (my intro)
Ten Pulp Things I Think I Think
Evan Lewis on Cleve Adams
T,T, Flynn’s Mike & Trixie (The ‘Lost Intro’)
John Bullard on REH’s Rough and Ready Clowns of the West – Part I (Breckenridge Elkins)
John Bullard on REH’s Rough and Ready Clowns of the West – Part II
William Patrick Murray on Supernatural Westerns, and Crossing Genres
Erle Stanley Gardner’s ‘Getting Away With Murder (And ‘A Black (Gat)’ turns 100!)
James Reasoner on Robert E. Howard’s Trail Towns of the old West
Frank Schildiner on Solomon Kane
Paul Bishop on The Fists of Robert E. Howard
John Lawrence’s Cass Blue
Dave Hardy on REH’s El Borak

Prior posts in A (Black) Gat in the Hand – 2022 Series (16)
Asimov – Sci Fi Meets the Police Procedural
The Adventures of Christopher London
Weird Menace from Robert E. Howard
Spicy Adventures from Robert E. Howard
Thrilling Adventures from Robert E. Howard
Norbert Davis’ “The Gin Monkey”
Tracer Bullet
Shovel’s Painful Predicament
Back Porch Pulp #1
Wally Conger on ‘The Hollywood Troubleshooter Saga’
Arsenic and Old Lace
David Dodge
Glen Cook’s Garrett, PI
John Leslie’s Key West Private Eye
Back Porch Pulp #2
Norbert Davis’ Max Latin

Prior posts in A (Black) Gat in the Hand – 2021 Series (7 )

The Forgotten Black Masker – Norbert Davis
Appaloosa
A (Black) Gat in the Hand is Back!
Black Mask – March, 1932
Three Gun Terry Mack & Carroll John Daly
Bounty Hunters & Bail Bondsmen
Norbert Davis in Black Mask – Volume 1

Prior posts in A (Black) Gat in the Hand – 2020 Series (21)
Hardboiled May on TCM
Some Hardboiled streaming options
Johnny O’Clock (Dick Powell)
Hardboiled June on TCM
Bullets or Ballots (Humphrey Bogart)
Phililp Marlowe – Private Eye (Powers Boothe)
Cool and Lam
All Through the Night (Bogart)
Dick Powell as Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar
Hardboiled July on TCM
YTJD – The Emily Braddock Matter (John Lund)
Richard Diamond – The Betty Moran Case (Dick Powell)
Bold Venture (Bogart & Bacall)
Hardboiled August on TCM
Norbert Davis – ‘Have one on the House’
with Steven H Silver: C.M. Kornbluth’s Pulp
Norbert Davis – ‘Don’t You Cry for Me’
Talking About Philip Marlowe
Steven H Silver Asks you to Name This Movie
Cajun Hardboiled – Dave Robicheaux
More Cool & Lam from Hard Case Crime

A (Black) Gat in the Hand – 2019 Series (15)
Back Deck Pulp Returns
A (Black) Gat in the Hand Returns
Will Murray on Doc Savage
Hugh B. Cave’s Peter Kane
Paul Bishop on Lance Spearman
A Man Called Spade
Hard Boiled Holmes
Duane Spurlock on T.T. Flynn
Andrew Salmon on Montreal Noir
Frank Schildiner on The Bad Guys of Pulp
Steve Scott on John D. MacDonald’s ‘Park Falkner’
William Patrick Murray on The Spider
John D. MacDonald & Mickey Spillane
Norbert Davis goes West(ern)
Bill Crider on The Brass Cupcake

A (Black) Gat in the Hand – 2018 Series (32)
George Harmon Coxe
Raoul Whitfield
Some Hard Boiled Anthologies
Frederick Nebel’s Donahue
Thomas Walsh
Black Mask – January, 1935
Norbert Davis’ Ben Shaley
D.L. Champion’s Rex Sackler
Dime Detective – August, 1939
Back Deck Pulp #1
W.T. Ballard’s Bill Lennox
Erle Stanley Gardner’s The Phantom Crook (Ed Jenkins)
Day Keene
Black Mask – October, 1933
Back Deck Pulp #2
Black Mask – Spring, 2017
Erle Stanley Gardner’s ‘The Shrieking Skeleton’
Frank Schildiner’s ‘Max Allen Collins & The Hard Boiled Hero’
A (Black) Gat in the Hand: William Campbell Gault
A (Black) Gat in the Hand: More Cool & Lam From Hard Case Crime
MORE Cool & Lam!!!!
Thomas Parker’s ‘They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?’
Joe Bonadonna’s ‘Hardboiled Film Noir’ (Part One)
Joe Bonadonna’s ‘Hardboiled Film Noir’ (Part Two)
William Patrick Maynard’s ‘The Yellow Peril’
Andrew P Salmon’s ‘Frederick C. Davis’
Rory Gallagher’s ‘Continental Op’
Back Deck Pulp #3
Back Deck Pulp #4
Back Deck Pulp #5
Joe ‘Cap’ Shaw on Writing
Back Deck Pulp #6
The Black Mask Dinner

Bob Byrne’s ‘A (Black) Gat in the Hand’ made its Black Gate debut in 2018 and has returned every Summer since.

His ‘The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes’ column ran every Monday morning at Black Gate from March, 2014 through March, 2017. And he irregularly posts on Rex Stout’s gargantuan detective in ‘Nero Wolfe’s Brownstone.’ He is a member of the Praed Street Irregulars, and founded www.SolarPons.com (the only website dedicated to the ‘Sherlock Holmes of Praed Street’).

He organized Black Gate’s award-nominated ‘Discovering Robert E. Howard’ series, as well as the award-winning ‘Hither Came Conan’ series. Which is now part of THE Definitive guide to Conan. He also organized 2023’s ‘Talking Tolkien.’

He has contributed stories to The MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories — Parts III, IV, V, VI, XXI, and XXXIII.

He has written introductions for Steeger Books, and appeared in several magazines, including Black Mask, Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine, The Strand Magazine, and Sherlock Magazine.

You can definitely ‘experience the Bobness’ at Jason Waltz’s ’24? in 42′ podcast.

The Chronicles of Amber and The Second Chronicles of Amber by Roger Zelazny (Gollancz SF Masterworks editions, April 14 and August 18, 2022). Covers uncredited

There are few authors whose works bring me greater joy than Roger Zelazny.

Zelazny was a master of craft and style who could present in a terse style that seamlessly evolves into evocative prose without any awkwardness or jarring transitions. His strengths as a writer were myriad: incredible storytelling, plot development, vivid descriptions, character development, and boundless imagination in the creation of strange worlds — sometimes a shade different from our own; other times wholly alien.

In The Chronicles of Amber, Zelazny exhibits all his strengths as a writer. It’s almost frustrating to read him, because he seems to perform his craft so effortlessly.

[Click the images for master craft versions.]

Roger Zelazny

Roger Zelazny’s The Chronicles of Amber is an absolute classic that I am about to revisit. I recently reread his novel Jack of Shadows, which is another fantastic work. But the Amber stories were perhaps his finest achievement.

Zelazny’s style of prose is something I really appreciate. It fluctuates from economical and concise, to poetic, to stream-of-consciousness — and it never jars the reader. It’s so smooth. I admire his work quite a bit.

I am a part of the evil which exists to oppose other evils. I destroy Melkins when I find them, and on that Great Day of which prophets speak but in which they do not truly believe, on that day when the world is completely cleansed of evil, then I, too, will go down into darkness, swallowing curses. Perhaps even sooner than that, I now judge. But whatever… Until that time, I shall not wash my hands nor let them hang useless.

—Roger Zelazny, The Chronicles of Amber, Book 2: The Guns of Avalon

Jack of Shadows (Signet, May 1985). Cover by Vicente Segrelles

There’s much more to Zelazny than the world of Amber, of course.

Jack of Shadows is a novel that I can read again and again. It’s a perfect fusion of science fiction and fantasy, conceived by a true master of genre fiction. It could make a great film in the right hands.

Jack of Shadows (Signet, May 1989). Cover by Richard Hescox

Shadowjack, Master Thief of Hell!

Who are his foes? All who would despise him or love the Lord of Smage of the Jackass Ears, the Colonel Who Never Died, the Borshin, and Quazer, winner of the Hellgames and abductor of the voluptuous Evene. One by one, Shadowjack would seek them out and have his revenge, building his power as he goes. And once his vengeance is obtained, he would come to terms with all others who are against him, he would unite the World of High Dudgeon, destroy the Land of Filth, and bring peace to the Shadowguard. But to accomplish all, Jack of Shadows must find Kolwynia, the Key That Was Lost…

A Night in Lonesome October (AvoNova paperback reprint, September 1994). Cover by James Warhola

A Night in Lonesome October is an absolute masterpiece. His final “solo” novel, this story is told from the first-person viewpoint of Jack’s watchdog, Snuff. Without giving away too many spoilers, Jack is loosely based on the infamous Jack the Ripper, and Snuff functions not quite like a pet, but a familiar spirit, one of several familiars (a bat, a cat, an owl, a rat, etc.) in the story, each with their own agendas, each with an eccentric master of great notoriety.

Zelazny’s prose often slows me down, as I pause to reread passages that are so well-wrought. Allow me to set this scene: Snuff is trying to remove a dead (murdered) body that was deposited on Jack’s property. He’s doing it not because Jack is the killer, but because he’s concerned about how it will look. Night after night he drags the body closer to a local river…

James Warhola’s cover for A Night in Lonesome October

First time out yesterday I got him farther through the muck, but he was still in it when I left him. I was tired. Jack was sequestered with his objects. The police were about, searching the area. The vicar was out, too, offering exhortations to the searchers. Night came on, and later I made my way back to the muck, chasing off a few vermin and beginning the long haul once again.

I’d worked on and off for over an hour, allowing myself several panting breaks, when I realized I was no longer alone. He was bigger than me even, and he moved with a silence I envied, some piece of the night cut loose and drifting against lesser blacknesses.

He seemed to know the moment I became aware of him, and he moved toward me with a long, effortless stride, one of the largest dogs I’d ever seen outside of Ireland.

Correction. As he came on I realized he wasn’t really a dog. It was a great gray wolf that was bearing down on me. I quickly reviewed my knowledge of the submissive postures these guys are into as I backed away from the corpse.

Quoting for emphasis:

He was bigger than me even, and he moved with a silence I envied, some piece of the night cut loose and drifting against lesser blacknesses.

That was a line I read again and again. True genius.

Jeffrey P. Talanian’s last article for Black Gate was a look at the The Enduring Legacy of Jack Kirby. Jeffrey is the creator and publisher of the Hyperborea sword-and-sorcery and weird science-fantasy RPG from North Wind Adventures. He was the co-author, with E. Gary Gygax, of the Castle Zagyg releases, including several Yggsburgh city supplements, Castle Zagyg: The East Mark Gazetteer, and Castle Zagyg: The Upper Works. Read Gabe Gybing’s interview with Jeffrey here, and follow his latest projects on Facebook and at www.hyperborea.tv.

Superman/Tarzan: Sons of the Jungle, issue 1 (Dark Horse, October 2001). Cover by Humberto Ramos

From Dark Horse Comics and DC comes Superman Tarzan: Sons of the Jungle, written by Chuck Dixon with interior art by Carlos Meglia. Cover art on the original issue covers was by Humberto Ramos.

This is a 3-issue comic arc that riffs off the original Tarzan story by Edgar Rice Burroughs. The mutiny aboard The Fuwalda takes place as usual, which is the start of Edgar Rice Burrough’s 1912/1914 serial/novel Tarzan of the Apes.

[Click the images for Superman-sized versions.]

Superman/Tarzan: Sons of the Jungle, issue 2 (Dark Horse, November 2001). Cover by Humberto Ramos

John Clayton and his pregnant wife, Alice, are about to be marooned on the coast of Africa when a flaming meteor sweeps over and crashes right where the crew was set to land. The crew takes that as a bad omen and instead returns to Cape Town to drop off the Claytons. Thus, the infant who would have become Tarzan is raised by his living parents in civilized Britain instead of by Kala and the Apes in the jungle.

Before that twist is completed, though, we find that the meteor which crashed was actually the ship carrying the infant Kal-El from Krypton to Earth. Kala ends up adopting “Superman” instead of Tarzan and he is named Argo-zan (fire-skin). That must have been quite an experience for the apes, though we don’t get to see any of Argo-zan’s earliest years.

Superman/Tarzan: Sons of the Jungle, issue 3 (Dark Horse, May 2002). Cover by Humberto Ramos

By the way, this appears to be the earliest incarnation of Kal-El where he is not so superpowered and can’t fly, but he is still far stronger than any human and cannot be physically injured.

Some spoilers ahead: The last 2 issues of the comic suggest that “fate” cannot be escaped because circumstances conspire to bring the man who would have been Tarzan and Jane Porter back to Africa, and they are accompanied by none other than Lois Lane.

La of Opar is set up as the bad guy and she’s discovered some Kryptonite that she hopes to use to control Argo-Zan. You gotta figure how that works out, and at the end, fate brings everyone back to the places where they should have been in the first place.

Superman/Tarzan: Sons of the Jungle collected edition (Dark Horse, September 30, 2002)

Here are my thoughts: It’s a cool idea and generally well done. Chuck Dixon does a smooth job with the story itself and the art facilitates the story.

My criticisms are twofold. 1. There’s a lot more story here than could adequately be told in 3 comic book issues. It’s a rich tale and because of word and length limits we only get parts of it.

I understand why but I’d still have liked more story, such as Argo-zan’s childhood and his interactions with the African wildlife, and John Clayton’s early growth as well. We see that John is “unsatisfied” with his civilized life and knows something is missing, but there were many scenes I’d have enjoyed getting a look at. (I’ll just tell them to myself in my head.)

Interior art for Superman/Tarzan: Sons of the Jungle by Carlos Meglia

My second criticism concerns the art. Let it be known that I have no artistic abilities myself and both Meglia and Ramos are immensely more talented than I am. I admire their skills, but I didn’t personally like many of the human images presented here, although I liked a lot of the jungle backgrounds.

The characters, though, are hugely exaggerated, particularly their faces. Superman looks like he has acromegaly on the covers, and some of the interiors are close to caricatures. (See the interior illustrations I include here.)

This may have been done on purpose as a style choice, but I mostly didn’t love that choice. I did like the pool reflection on issue #1’s cover. Your appreciation may differ and that’s perfectly fine.

Charles Gramlich administers The Swords & Planet League group on Facebook, where this post first appeared. His last article for us was a a review of The Iron Tower Trilogy by Dennis L. McKiernan. See all of his recent posts for Black Gate here.

Paul W. Fairman

If Paul W. Fairman’s name is known, it is likely as an editor or the ghostwriter who wrote several of the juvenile novels published under Lester del Rey’s name when the latter author suffered from writers block. However, he had his own career as an author and Marvin W. Hunt commented, his “novels deserve the attention of science fiction enthusiasts not only because his books display the requisite technological prescience of good science-fiction, but especially because they are well written.”

Fairman was born on August 22, 1909 in St. Louis, Missouri.

Fairman began publishing in the February 1947 issue of Mammoth Detective with the story “Late Rain,” and in 1950 he published his first science fiction story, “No Teeth for the Tiger” in the February issue of Amazing Stories. Between 1951 and 1953, he occasionally used the housename Ivar Jorgensen, and in 1954, the film Target Earth was based on Fairman’s story “Deadly City,” which appeared under that pseudonym.  He also used the pseudonyms Robert Eggert Lee and the housename E.K. Jarvis, which was also used by Robert Moore Williams.

Amazing Stories, February 1950
Cover by Robert Gibson Jones

In 1952, James L. Quinn hired Fairman to help him create rivals to the magazines Fate and Other Worlds. The results were the nonfiction magazine Strange, which looked at the bizarre and mysterious in the world, and If, which published science fiction. Fairman became the editor of both magazines. His knowledge of the field, however, was limited and neither magazine had an auspicious start, with Strange being cancelled after only four issues. If tended to look back to an older form of science fiction, ignoring what was being done by the newer magazines in the field. After the fourth issue, Fairman was fired and Quinn began editing If.

Fairman landed on his feet at Ziff-Davis, where he worked as an Associate Editor of Fantastic Adventures. Although he briefly left Ziff-Davis in 1954, he returned the following year and when Howard Brown left the company in 1956, Fairman became editor of Amazing Stories and Fantastic. He also oversaw the launch of the magazine Dream World, which had been started by Browne. He also launched Amazing Stories Science Fiction Novels, which lasted a single issue and published the novelization of the film 20 Million Miles to Earth, by Henry Slesar. It lasted a single issue.

Despite the magazines he edited, Fairman was more interested in writing than editing and he began to let his assistant handle more and more of the editorial work. At the end of 1958, he stepped down as editor of Amazing and Fantastic to edit Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine and his assistant, Cele Goldsmith, took over the job of editor of the two speculative fiction magazines.

In addition to the previously mentioned adaptation of “Deadly City” into Target Earth, Fairman’s story “The Cosmic Frame” was adapted into the 1957 film Invasion of the Saucer Men and a decade later as the television movie Attack of the Eye Creatures. He also had stories adapted for The Twilight Zone and General Electric Theatre.

Fairman died in October, 1977 in Newark, New Jersey.

Steven H Silver is a twenty-two time Hugo Award nominee and was the publisher of the Hugo-nominated fanzine Argentus as well as the editor and publisher of ISFiC Press for eight years. He has also edited books for DAW, NESFA Press, and ZNB. His most recent anthology is Alternate Peace and his novel After Hastings was published in 2020. Steven has chaired the first Midwest Construction, Windycon three times, and the SFWA Nebula Conference numerous times. He was programming chair for Chicon 2000 and Vice Chair of Chicon 7.

Daybreak 2250 AD, originally published as Star Man’s Son, one half of Ace Double D-69 (Ace Books, 1954). Cover artist unknown

I started intentionally looking for science fiction to read in elementary school. Our city library had one big room full of fiction for young readers, from preschool through high school, so I found books that were meant for readers older than I was — but I enjoyed reading them, even if I didn’t understand everything that happened to their protagonists. The top two science fiction writers, for me and I think for a lot of other people, were Robert Heinlein and Andre Norton.

Norton had written half a dozen novels, mostly historical, before she ventured into science fiction in 1952 with Star Man’s Son. But it seems to have been successful; she wrote a new fiction novels nearly every year for some time after that, and I went on reading the library copies at least up through Catseye in 1961.

[Click the images for giant cat versions.]

Ace Double D-69: Beyond Earth’s Gates by Lewis Padgett (Henry Kuttner) and C.L. Moore,
and Daybreak 2250 A.D. by Andre Norton (Ace, 1954). Covers by Harry Barton, unknown

Star Man’s Son was a cleverly chosen title. It clearly signaled that this was science fiction. But it wasn’t, as the words seem to promise, a story about travel between the stars. Its Star Men were the elite of a hidden community high in the mountains, called the Eyrie, whose mission was to go out into the largely depopulated lands around them and look for the ruins of cities, both to find treasures such as colored pencils and to try to recover the lost knowledge of their builders.

Star Man’s Son is one of the founding works of the post-nuclear-war genre, published only seven years after Hiroshima, but envisioning a world devastated by nuclear weapons: massively depopulated, with many areas left lethally radioactive, and with parts of the land geologically transformed.

Gamma World by Gary “Jake” Jaquet and James M. Ward (TSR, 1978). Cover by David C. Sutherland III

As a by-product of the radioactivity, there are mutant forms of various species, including human beings. In fact this setting could be a prototype for the early roleplaying game Gamma World.

Norton’s hero, Fors, is one of these mutants, and that’s the starting point for her story’s conflict. Fors’s father was a Star Man, and a very successful one. But Fors’s mother came from a different culture, the Plains People, who lead a nomadic existence in the deserted lands outside the Eyrie; and Fors himself has mutant traits, both visible — white hair — and invisible — night vision and preternaturally keen ears.

Dust jacket for Star Mans Son 2250 A.D. (Harcourt, Brace & Company, August 1952). Cover by Nicolas Mordvinoff

Orphaned by his father’s death on an expedition into the wilderness, Fors wants to succeed him as a Star Man, but is repeatedly rejected, out of a prejudice against mutants. At 17, after his sixth and final rejection, Fors rebels, stealing his father’s gear (but not his father’s star, which he hasn’t earned) and venturing out into the wild lands on his own, looking for a fabled lost city of the ancient world that would prove his worth.

Norton doesn’t link any locations to familiar geographic names, but her readers would naturally have assumed that her story took place in North America. From her descriptions, the Eyrie could be in the Rocky Mountains, perhaps in Colorado; the plains might be Kansas or Nebraska; and the city that Fors eventually finds might be any major Midwestern city, though I’ve long assumed that it was Chicago, and apparently other readers commonly do the same. (This isn’t like Pangborn’s postapocalyptic setting, with little kingdoms bearing easily parsed names such as Bershar, Penn, or Vairmant.)

Dust jacket for Star Mans Son 2250 A.D. (Staples Press, 1953). Cover by R. Dulford

The combination of ruined structures and depopulation is curiously similar to Tolkien’s realm of Arnor, which would appear a few years later in The Fellowship of the Ring; Tolkien rejected any suggestion that the One Ring was an allegory for the atomic bomb, but both stories seem to reflect the idea of a fallen higher civilization, analogous to Rome, and perhaps the idea that the industrial West could also fall was made more credible by the destructiveness of the World Wars.

Another parallel to what Tolkien would publish is the existence of an inherently hostile race, the Beast Things. Like Tolkien’s orcs, they have a roughly human form, but one that’s hideous to human eyes; in this case, they have faces and clawed hands that make them resemble gigantic rats.

Daybreak 2250 A.D. (Ace Books, 1961). Artist unknown

The Beast Things seem to lead entirely collectivized tribal existences and to be naturally cruel and hostile to human beings.

And in Star Man’s Son, where they previously were a minor threat, dangerous mostly to solitary explorers, they have emerged to more organized hostility, attacking various human groups in vast hordes (where those hordes came from is no clearer than it was for the “goblins” in The Hobbit; such enemy races tend to have a nightmarish fecundity).

Their origins are obscure, but they’re clearly mutants, and help explain where the common hostility to mutants came from.

The 1977 cover refresh from Ace Books. Cover artist also unknown

Fors’s own venture acquires a companion from a different culture still, with its own traditional heritage from the more civilized past: Arskane, whom Fors pulls out of a pit trap and treats with an antibiotic salve (and in return, Arskane introduces him to coffee, which Fors doesn’t like at all!).

From Norton’s description, it’s clear that Arskane is Black, and it’s curious that where Heinlein found it necessary to hint cryptically at Rod Walker’s ethnicity in Tunnel in the Sky, published only a few years later in 1955 (his publisher was worried about sales in the South),

Fawcett Crest paperback edition, which returned to the
original title (Fawcett Crest, August 1978). Cover by Ken Barr

Norton didn’t have any trouble showing Fors and Arskane teaming up and even coming to regard each other as brothers. (Or might Heinlein have been unnecessarily worried?) Arskane’s account of his people’s origins to Fors makes them descendants of aviators, and perhaps Norton was thinking of the Tuskegee Airmen and expecting her readers to do likewise. And in parallel, Norton mentions a legend that the Eyrie was originally a base for an intended venture into space, which is why its elite explorers are called Star Men.

Fors is also accompanied by another mutant: Lura, descended from domestic cats, but grown larger and apparently empathic through the effects of radiation. (The image of the symbiotic goes back a long way before Honor Harrington.)

The first ten Honor Harrington novels by David Weber, plus two novels in the Honorverse series (Baen Books, 1993-2016). Covers by David Mattingly, Laurence Schwinger, and Gary Ruddell

Lura is described as having a coat coloration similar to Siamese cats. She accompanies Fors through most of his journeys and is only temporarily parted from him during one major crisis. Aelurophilia seems to be a common trait among science fiction writers and readers, and Norton does a persuasive job of appealing to it.

All of this shows that the novel’s recurring theme is mutation: The Beast Things, Lura, Fors himself, and a variety of exotic life forms such as a race of diminutive lizards that tend farms and wield poisonous weapons are all mutants. And the novel’s continued point is that “mutant” as such is not a moral category: Mutation can be either good or bad, depending on what the mutant does.

The Darkness and Dawn omnibus, containing the novels No Night Without Stars (1975) and Daybreak 2250 A.D. (Baen Books, March 2003). Cover by Bob Eggleton

At the novel’s climax, we have the mutant Fors playing a vital role in a stratagem aimed to have all the human forces unite against an army of the mutant Beast Things — and then confronting a threatened outbreak of war between the different formerly allied human forces. Norton seems to be making a point similar to St. Paul’s statement that “Here there is no Greek or Jew, circumcised or uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave, or free” — or, in this case, mutant or nonmutant.

Indeed, her characters raise the question of whether it’s good to preserve the unchanged likeness of the ancient humanity that destroyed its own civilization in a vast war.

Star Man’s Son title page, with illustration by Nicolas Mordvinoff

In a review of this novel, quoted in the copy I read, the Denver Post called it “a good adventure story which is a thoughtful book as well,” and I think that’s a fair summary. Like Heinlein, Norton assumed that her readers would be interested in serious themes and able to make sense of them; and that was part of what made her a leading author of “juvenile” science fiction.

William H. Stoddard is a professional copy editor specializing in scholarly and scientific publications. As a secondary career, he has written more than two dozen books for Steve Jackson Games, starting in 2000 with GURPS Steampunk. He lives in Lawrence, Kansas with his wife, their cat (a ginger tabby), and a hundred shelf feet of books, including large amounts of science fiction, fantasy, and graphic novels.

The Iron Tower Trilogy: The Dark Tide, Shadows of Doom, and The Darkest Day
(Signet, August 1985, September 1985, and October 1985). Covers by Alan Lee

I recently posted some of my thoughts about High Fantasy. I haven’t read a large amount from that field but I did read Dennis L. McKiernan’s first trilogy of books, the Iron Tower trilogy, which is definitely High Fantasy written very strongly in the Tolkien tradition.

Here’s my review of those three books, which I read in an omnibus edition.

Back covers for The Dark Tide, Shadows of Doom, and The Darkest Day

While laid up after a motorcycle accident for several months, Dennis L. McKiernan (1932 – ) began writing what he first intended to be a sequel to The Lord of the Rings. When that plan fell through, he changed some of the setting and produced his Iron Tower trilogy, which was published by Doubleday in 1984, although he started the work in 1977 after his accident.

I read the three in the omnibus edition shown below, but the three books are:

The Dark Tide (Signet, August 1985)
Shadows of Doom (Signet, September 1985)
The Darkest Day (Signet, October 1985)

The omnibus edition of the Iron Tower trilogy (Roc, 2000). Cover by Jerry Vanderstelt

These are McKiernan’s first books and show his inexperience, but he did produce some memorable characters and I generally enjoyed the books.

Perhaps because of how the work was initially conceived, as a sequel to Tolkien’s work, they bear a very close resemblance to Tolkien’s setting, characters, and overall story arcs, so much so that one might be forgiven for considering them pastiche Tolkien. From what I’ve heard, McKiernan went on to write much more original material later.

However, though I have a couple of his later books I’ve not read any of them. Anyone have a recommendation for something good from him?

Charles Gramlich administers The Swords & Planet League group on Facebook, where this post first appeared. His last article for us was a a review of the Bigfoot: Sword of the Earthman graphic novel by Josh S. Henaman, Andy Taylor, and Tamra Bonvillain. See all of his recent posts for Black Gate here.

Good afterevenmorn, Readers!

This past Saturday, I headed out with a few of my martial arts students, past and present, to watch the second installment of the recent Mortal Kombat adaptations. I’m not going to lie, the draw for me was the involvement of Karl Urban as Johnny Cage. Cage was never a character I played, but the retired action movie star is a fun idea for this franchise, and I will generally support anything Karl Urban does. Even when it’s bad, he’s great in it. And sometimes when it’s bad, it’s good. Ask me about my love of the 2005 film Doom one day. I never said I had great taste.

The point is, I went and saw the movie, and the short review is, I loved it (see afore mentioned note about my tastes). Let’s dive in!

My entry into the Mortal Kombat universe was the original arcade game. I was, predictably, terrible at it. But it was a great time all the same. I credit Mortal Kombat, and shows like Xena: Warrior Princess, with pointing me to my long-term, much loved hobby of martial arts training (for those who don’t know, I train and teach Kickboxing and Northern Mantis Kung Fu).

It helped that the former had a character that shared my first name, albeit with a different spelling – Sonya. You bet I played her nearly exclusively. But the game also had a plethora of female characters who, importantly for little me, went toe-to-toe with male opponents. Their victory was not conditional to their gender (though a lot of the finishers were… I got very annoyed with Sonya’s finisher when they turned it into the ‘kiss of death.’ A kiss? Really? Anyway…), but on the skill of the person who had selected her as their avatar.

That’s my girl.

Oddly enough, I didn’t much like the first of the new Mortal Kombat films. There was something about them that just didn’t jive with me. I think, upon reflection, that the problem was that it took itself entirely too seriously for the ridiculousness of the premise. Perhaps? Not entirely sure. But I wasn’t a huge fan of the first of the most recent adaptations.

That was not the case for this one. Yes, this movie is so silly. It’s not a thinker. But what it is, is really, really fun (and gory). Don’t go if you’re looking for some deeper meaning into the human condition. You won’t find it. Do go if you’re looking for some excellent action, good laughs, and a lot of blood.

The story of Mortal Kombat II largely abandons Cole as the main character, relegating him to one of the crew. Enter Johnny Cage, a washed-up action hero from the age of really cheesy, badly choreographed action films of the kind we lost in the early 90s (making this film a little meta, as it is also a really cheesy (but much better choreographed) action flick, harkening back to the kind we lost in the early 90s). You know, when action movies were dumb and fun… or sometimes just dumb. Really dumb. I particularly enjoyed the really bad action scene from one of his movies we were subjected to as a character introduction. It was horrifically bad. And that was just awesome. A perfect way to set the tone for the character and the movie.

It was such a terrible sequence. And it showcased a particular character move from the games, too. So bad. So great.

I giggled my way through it.

For some reason, unseen by either his character or the audience, he has been selected as the replacement for Kung Lao as a defender of Earth Realm (Spoiler: Kung Lao was killed in the last movie); a call to adventure that he promptly rejects. Not that it does him much good. What I like about this is that Johnny Cage is not magically suddenly extremely good at martial arts when he is dragged into the Mortal Kombat arena. He was in his youth. But he is no longer young. And while he was a winning fighter as a young man, all of the hard work in his films were done by stunt doubles. And it shows. He doesn’t exactly perform well.

That’s all I’m going to say about it, because I don’t want to stray too far into spoiler territory.

I will say, however, that Karl Urban was very aware what kind of film this was, and very pleasingly hammed it up. So many of his scenes were flat out silly, and in it’s own self-aware way, hilarious.

To my surprise, however, that was not my greatest joy in this film. That honour once again belonged to Josh Lawson who reprised his role as Kano (he was in the trailer, so I don’t feel like this is too much of a spoiler). Kano was, to my mind, the best thing about the previous film. He also stood out here… but that might just be because of who I am and the fact that this time around he was so aggressively Australian that it very nearly killed me (I am much less aggressively Australian). I laughed hardest and loudest at his scenes. Even thinking about it now, I still giggle. It’s not often that Australia gets any kind of representation in films. In fact, the only other ensemble movie I can think of that had an explicitly Australian character was Pitch Black, and, well, he didn’t last long. To be fair, not too many characters did.

I am fairly sure that other folks of other backgrounds won’t take as much delight in Kano as I did, so I would not count on it to up the enjoyment of this film. But for me very specifically, it absolutely did.

Don’t let the poster fool you. He is a deeply unserious character.

Kano steals the show. Yet again.

The story itself is about what you’d expect for this franchise. Broadly, Earth is under threat, and heroes, under the tutelage of the lightning god Raiden, must overcome their personal limitations to rise against the foe in order to save Earthrealm from annexation. But even in this, through the figure of Johnny Cage, the film kind of makes fun of itself. Of course, the folks on the other side are up to shenanigans, and so they must be countered — both inside and outside the arena.

There are a lot of great fight scenes, a tonne of gore (which is to be expected, given the nature of the games), some unexpected deaths (no one is safe. No one. Side note: in my viewing, when one of the characters was killed someone in the front row exclaimed, “Nooooo!” quite loudly. Go see it with an audience, is what I’m saying. It was great.), and so, so many laughs. It was not deep, or profound, or even serious.

It was fun.

It evoked the old-school feeling action movies used to have: fun was the goal. I don’t know about you, but, given the state of well… everything, I desperately needed something fun. Mortal Kombat II perfectly scratched that itch. Definitely worth the cost of admission, silliness and all.

My goodness was it silly. What a good time in the cinema.

When S.M. Carrière isn’t brutally killing your favorite characters, she spends her time teaching martial arts, live streaming video games, and sometimes painting. In other words, she spends her time teaching others to kill, streaming her digital kills, and sometimes relaxing. Her most recent titles include Daughters of Britain, Skylark and Human. The Timbercreek Incident is free to read on Wattpad.

So, last week, I talked about ten movies that you can stream for free over on Tubi. I could easily list ten or twenty more. There’s a lot of good stuff there.

I’m also watching TV shows on Tubi. Of course, a multiple season show takes a lot longer to work through, than a single movie. It’s got some cool animated shows, like Pinky and the Brain, The Looney Tunes Show, and The Pirates of Darkwater. I’ll probably do a post like this on just cartoons.

But today we’ll talk about live-action shows. Now, PlutoTV is terrific for TV shows. Entire channels dedicated to Star Trek shows, mysteries, Westerns, etc.. And I’m leaning into RokuTV (also free). But let’s look at ten shows you can catch on Tubi. Some of the biggest hits are there, but I’ll try to focus on some others.

A reminder: I talked here about how I was finally fed up with all the streaming apps I needed to watch stuff. So, except for Prime (the family orders a lot of stuff from Amazon), I cut the chord on all of them. I’m missing Daredevil, and didn’t watch a single Pittsburgh Penguins playoff game (I did listen to all of them). But it’s going fine.

1 – SIMON AND SIMON

I caught an episode of this here and there over the years, but had never watched it through. I’ve always liked it, and it hasn’t lost its charm. Two brothers barely make a living as private eyes in San Diego. This is the show that launched Gerald McRaney.

It’s definitely a little cheesy, but this is a fun buddy PI show. And love the two theme songs. Hardcastle and McCormick, and Riptide, and T.J. Hooker, are three favorites I’m going to re-watch on Tubi. But I’ll plug Simon and Simon here.

2 – RESCUE ME

I was aware that this was a popular and critically praised show in the early 2000s. I didn’t like Leary much, and I never watched it. But I’m going to give season one of this fire-fighting drama, a try. Leary’s latest show, Going Dutch, just got canceled last week. It had its ups and downs, but I saw every episode.

3 – THE TICK

I loved the animated show. And Amazon’s series was very good. But I was disappointed with Patrick Warburton’s short-lived series when it came out. I decided to give it a re-watch. It’s still my least favorite Tick, but I did like it this time around. I just had to get in the right frame of mind and accept it for what it was. Not how I would have done it, but it’s not a bad watch.

4 – BLUE RIDGE: THE SERIES

I liked the movie that started this off, and I liked season one of the streaming show which followed. It is now on Tubi. It stars Johnathon Schaech, who was the arrogant Jimmy in one of my favorite ‘under-the-radar’ movies, That Thing You Do!.

He’s a kick-ass ex-Green Beret, now sheriff in the Blue Ridge Mountains. A second season dropped last month, and I’m gonna try to find it. Go read my prior post – and you should start with the movie, if you can. But this is a cool show.

5 – DOC MARTIN

I am a big fan of Best Medicine, which had its first season earlier this year. It’s an American version of Doc Martin, a British show featuring Martin Clunes. Clunes actually appeared as Martin Best’s father, in the new show.

I like the new show, and I like the original. Doc Martin is socially awkward, and he’s kind of a butthead. Not in the Dr. Gregory House vein, but he can be difficult to root for sometimes. I recommend both Doc Martin, and Best Medicine.

6 – SHERLOCK HOLMES (JEREMY BRETT)

You may know that my first three years at Black Gate, my column was called The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes. I love me some Holmes. And as I wrote in this three part series, Jeremy Brett is the definitive screen Holmes. They have a bunch (though not all) of Brett’s episodes. HIGHLY recommended.

Tubi has a ton of television and movie Holmes. Even one from 2011 I’d never heard of. I’ll probably do a Ten Things on Tubi Holmes. But Jeremy Brett is a treat.

7 – COLUMBO/MURDOCH MYSTERIES

I am a HUUUUGE Columbo fan. I’m still trying to get together a multi-contributor Columbo series here at Black Gate. I did write about the lieutenant, here. I have the entire series on DVD (no commercials), but I’d be remiss not to point out you can watch it free on Tubi. Possibly the greatest mystery series of all time.

Murdoch Mysteries has my vote as the greatest Canadian mystery series of all time.

8 -SOAP

I saw a little of Soap during its run, but I was only 10 years old when it started. And I didn’t like it. Obviously, I didn’t understand much of it, as well. I do remember I regularly watched the spin-off, Benson. Robert Guillaume and Rene Auberjonois were terrific in that. But Soap was a critically acclaimed ‘adult’ comedy. I should probably check it out now.

9 – C.P.O SHARKEY

Don Rickles was in his prime before my time. But he was still around as I was a kid in the 70s. He was a comb of Archie Bunker and the yet-to-come Dennis Leary. I don’t watch him, but this is a very nineteen seventies sitcom.

10 – ROUTE 66

I never saw this sixties show. I know the song from the King Cole Trio about Route 66. But only when I came across this on Tubi, did I realize it starred Martin Milner, who would later be on Adam-12. And he was the murder victim in the first episode of Columbo. Apparently it’s kind of a spin-off from The Naked City – another show I’ve heard of but not seen.

MORE

When you browse, you’ll probably say more than once, “Oh yeah. I should watch that again. There’s Perfect Strangers, Barney Miller, The Drew Carey Show, Major Dad, Dead Like Me, Saved by the Bell, and so many more shows from your past.

I definitely think I’ll do a post on animated shows – it’s a treasure trove for that.

I just added close to ten Bowery Boys movies to my Tubi list. It’s definitely filling the paid streaming gap.

Some previous entries on things to watch:

Ten Things: Tubi Movies
The Hudsucker Proxy
Let’s Go to the Movies:1996
Firefly – The Animated Reboot
What I’ve Been Watching – February 2026 (The Night Manager, SS-GB, Best Medicine)
What I’ve Been Watching – October 2026 (Return to Paradise, Lynley, Expend4bles, and more)
What I’ve Been Watching – August 2025 (Ballard, Resident Alien, Twisted Metal, and more)
What I’ve Been Watching – May 2025 (County Line, The Bondsman, Bosch: Legacy)
What I’ve Been Watching – October 2024 (What We Do in the Shadows, The Bay, Murder in a Small Town)
What I’m Watching – November 2023 (Brooklyn Nine-Nine, The Caine Mutiny Court Martial, A Haunting in Venice)
What I’m Watching – April 2023 (Florida Man, Picard – season three, The Mandalorian)
The Pale Blue Eye, and The Glass Onion: Knives Out
Tony Hillerman’s Dark Winds
The Rings of Power (Series I wrote on this show – all links at this one post)
What I’m Watching – December 2022 (Frontier, Leverage: Redemption)
What I’m Watching – November 2022 (Tulsa King, Andor, Fire Country, and more)
What I’m Watching – September 2022 (Galavant, Firefly, She-Hulk, and more)
What I’m Watching- April 2022 (Outer Range, Halo, Why Didn’t They Ask Evans, and more)
When USA Network was Kicking Major Butt (Monk, Psych, Burn Notice)
You Should be Streaming These Shows (Corba Kai, The Expanse, Bosch, and more)
What I’m BritBoxing – December 2021 (Death in Paradise, Shakespeare & Hathaway, The Blake Mysteries, and more)
To Boldly Go – Star Treking – (Various Star Trek incarnations)
What I’ve Been Watching – August 2021 (Monk, The Tomorrow War, In Plain Sight, and more)
What I’m Watching – June 2021 (Get Shorty, Con Man, Thunder in Paradise, and more)
Tucker and Dale vs. Evil
What I’ve Been Watching – June 2021 (Relic Hunter, Burn Notice, Space Force, and more)
Appaloosa
Psych of the Dead
The Mandalorian
What I’m Watching: 2020 – Part Two (My Name is Bruce, Sword of Sherwood Forest, Isle of Fury, and more)
What I’m Watching 2020: Part One (The Adventures of Brisco County Jr, Poirot, Burn Notice, and more)
Philip Marlowe: Private Eye
Leverage
Nero Wolfe – The Lost Pilot
David Suchet’s ‘Poirot’
Sherlock Holmes (over two dozen TV shows and movies)

Bob Byrne’s ‘A (Black) Gat in the Hand’ made its Black Gate debut in 2018 and has returned every summer since.

His ‘The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes’ column ran every Monday morning at Black Gate from March, 2014 through March, 2017. And he irregularly posts on Rex Stout’s gargantuan detective in ‘Nero Wolfe’s Brownstone.’ He is a member of the Praed Street Irregulars, and founded www.SolarPons.com (the only website dedicated to the ‘Sherlock Holmes of Praed Street’).

He organized Black Gate’s award-nominated ‘Discovering Robert E. Howard’ series, as well as the award-winning ‘Hither Came Conan’ series. Which is now part of THE Definitive guide to Conan. He also organized 2023’s ‘Talking Tolkien.’

He has contributed stories to The MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories — Parts III, IV, V, VI, XXI, and XXXIII.

He has written introductions for Steeger Books, and appeared in several magazines, including Black Mask, Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine, The Strand Magazine, and Sherlock Magazine.

You can definitely ‘experience the Bobness’ at Jason Waltz’s ’24? in 42′ podcast.

Gor (The Cannon Group, May 9, 1987)

A veritable cornucopia of dodgy barbarian and barbarian-adjacent movies that I have never watched before, and will probably never watch again. Enjoy Part One here.

Gor (1987) – USA/Italy

Another nail in the Cannon coffin lid, this effort to start a franchise based on the uncomfortable series of novels by John Norman spawned one sequel, and then went belly up before things could get worse.

It follows the same basic plot of the books; dull physics prof Tarl Cabot (Urbano Barbarini — dull as a dish cloth) owns a family heirloom macguffin that transports him to the barbaric planet of Gor, where he must right some wrongs and show the locals that human is best — so far, so very Barsoomy.

Urbano Barbarini and Rebecca Ferratti in Gor

Cabot falls in with a village being ransacked by tyrannical despot and maniacal giggler, Sarm (Oliver ‘I’ll get the beers in’ Reed, having a wonderful time). After a run in with some ne’er-do-wells, Cabot is nursed back to health by semi-clad princess Talena (Rebecca ‘more hairspray’ Ferratti) and soon they are off to reclaim another macguffin in order for Cabot to return home. It isn’t long before the landscape is strewn with bodies, slave girls, and partially covered bum cheeks, and it all culminates in a fiery showdown with Olly Reed.

John Norman’s series justifiably has its critics regarding his depiction of women — specifically the slavery and sexual abuse, which becomes a lot darker and pornographic as the books continued to be rolled out. Some (but not all) of the overt misogyny is glossed over however, and the film just serves as another one of the dime-a-dozen S&S videos to decorate your local Blockbuster in the mid-80s. I’m adding a point for Oliver Reed.

5/10

Outlaw of Gor (Cannon International, March 21, 1988) Outlaw of Gor (1988) – USA/Italy

Hot on the sandal heels of the previous plod-a-thon came this one, not based on Norman’s 1967 novel of the same name, but featuring most of the same characters and actors, and a misguided determination to get some more female slaves on screen.

This time the plank masquerading as a physics prof, Cabot, is tossed back onto Gor following a car crash, but this time he’s not alone. He is joined by an annoying co-worker (Russel Savadier) who has been sandal-horned into the plot in an attempt to distract us from Jack Palance’s hats. Yes, Jack Palance, who had one of the top billings in the last film (he was on screen for 3 mins), has taken over the Olly Reed role, but he is having far less fun with it, and in fact is usurped by evil queen Lara (Donna Denton), who frames Cabot for Talena’s dad’s murder and send him on the run.

Cabot, along with his diminutive, white-haired chum, Hup (Nigel Chipps), wander around in the desert for a bit, stumble into a slave trader camp, free a slave girl, and generally cause a kerfuffle. Unfortunately, Lara has sent a hunter after them and he soon catches them and brings them back to the palace to face the music. Cue fights, wrongs being righted, and another generous sprinkling of sand-blasted flesh.

They upped the humour in this one, to no great effect, and Palance really doesn’t get to do much at all. At least Cabot gets to stay on Gor this time, thus saving his class from another boring physics lecture.

4/10

The New Barbarians (Titanus, April 7, 1983) The New Barbarians (1983) – USA/Italy

Barbarians of the future this time (AKA Warriors of the Wasteland), as humanity has descended into Road Warrior style chaos, stealing much of the other film’s plot too. The rest of the story concerns a lone warrior, Mad Ma… sorry, ‘Scorpion’ (Giancarlo Preti), a former soldier of a quasi-religious bunch of nutters called the Templars.

These Templars, led by a cookie-cutter villain called ‘One’ (George Eastman), are determined to judge and exterminate all other survivors in order to purify the world or something. When they set their sights on a group of peaceniks, it’s up to Scorpion to save the day, but not before he has forced himself on several women, and then been raped himself by One in a scene that springs out of nowhere and sours an already less-than-sweet film. Director Enzo G. Castellari and his production team found a lovely quarry just outside Rome, and chose to never leave it, hurtling their cybertruck-lite buggies around the rocks with wild abandon.

Then blow me down, just as I was starting to tire of the whole debacle, who should turn up but Fred Williamson, playing a bad-ass dude called Nadir. Suddenly I was all in, and the film must have realized what an ace it was holding, because it ramped up the violence (sooo many exploding heads) and the hilarity (Nadir uses a bow with explosive-tipped arrows, but he takes an unbelievably long time to attach the tips to the shafts, while the people he is trying to save are getting the snot kicked out of them).

Ultimately though it’s a bit of a silly slog, but I’m sticking a couple of extra points onto this for Fred Williamson and exploding body parts.

6/10

Iron Warrior (Continental Motion Pictures, January 1, 1987) Iron Warrior (1987) – USA/Italy

For a fleeting moment I was intrigued by this one. The opening scene of a pair of young brothers playing with a ball among some ruins was rather nicely shot, with some interesting framing and editing decisions, and I thought I might have stumbled onto a decent one. I could even forgive the clearly stolen James Horner strains from various Star Treks.

Oh, how I laughed when I realised my mistake three minutes later when it all plummeted into nonsense. One of the boys is kidnapped by a witch, Phoedra (Elisabeth Kaza), who encases him in a formidable suit of iron and turns him into her enforcer.

Flash forward several years and the unsullied brother, Ator, lurches onto the scene, all muscles, tragic hair and cheekbones to cut diamonds on. Ator then proceeds to protect various kingdoms from Phoedra, all the while coming closer to the final showdown with (shock!) his brother. Ator is played by Miles O’Keeffe, whom I remembered from the awful Tarzan movie he made with Bo Derek, released in 1981. This bloke, pretty as he is, gives planks a bad name as he vogues his way from one lackluster sword fight to the next.

I had no idea that I was watching the third film in a series of Ator movies, but it didn’t really matter, and following this one I had no desire to seek out the others. Feel free to comment if this was a mistake and I’ve actually missed some classics (but I won’t hold my breath).

4/10

The Dungeonmaster (Empire Pictures, August 24, 1984) The Dungeonmaster (1984) – USA

AKA Rage War: The Challenges of Excalibrate AKA Digital Knights.

Jeffrey Byron plays a computer nerd called Paul, who has an unhealthy attachment to his A.I. assistant X-CaliBR8, predicting Richard Dawkins’ confusion 42 years ago. His long-suffering girlfriend, Gwen (Leslie Wing), has finally had enough of her digital rival, but before she can do anything about it, they are both whisked away to a fantastical land by a demonic sorcerer called Mestema (Richard Moll), who has been searching for a worthy challenger for some reason, and has decided a nerd and his Siri are it.

Also, he fancies Gwen. Paul has a ‘pipboy’ style version of X-CaliBR8 (Cali for short, thank God), on his wrist, and this thing can do bloody anything, which is useful as Memesta is about to hurl a bunch of different challenges at Paul that have no real connection to anything, and seem extraordinarily easy to beat. Challenges are met, monsters are squashed, demonic sorcerers are defeated, and Paul and Gwen get to go back to their unholy love triangle in their apartment.

Now, I love me a good anthology movie, and this ain’t it. The challenges consist of seven story segments, made by seven directors to varying degrees of competence, ranging from almost interesting to crap. John Carl Buechler got to direct one, and I’ve always loved his films (Ghoulies, anyone?), but his effort was rubbish. Dave Allen, stop-motion maestro, also made one, but that was rubbish too. However, neither of these were as rubbish as the other five, and one of them featured heavy metal lads WASP — go figure.

Nothing made any sense, the wrist-mounted Cali developed super laser powers that I’m pretty sure Paul didn’t program, and the whole shebang is a ludicrous mess.

Recommended.

5/10

Previous Murky Movie surveys from Neil Baker include:

Fauxnan the Barbarian, Part One
Probing Questions
My Top Thirty Films
The Star Warses
Just When You Thought It Was Safe
Tech Tok
The Weyland-Yutaniverse
Foreign Bodies
Mummy Issues
Ch-Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes
Monster Mayhem

See all of Neil Baker’s Black Gate film reviews here. Neil spends his days watching dodgy movies, most of them terrible, in the hope that you might be inspired to watch them too. He is often asked why he doesn’t watch ‘proper’ films, and he honestly doesn’t have a good answer. He is an author, illustrator, teacher, and sculptor of turtle exhibits.

The Vanishing Tower (DAW Books, June 1977). Cover by Michael Whelan

Here’s another in my series of reviews of “mostly obscure” 1970s/1980s books — the last one was of Evangeline Walton’s The Children of Llyr. That book was published in 1971, and so was the original edition of The Vanishing Tower (first titled The Sleeping Sorceress.)

And already I can hear people asking “Obscure? Obscure?! Evangeline Walton’s Mabinogion retellings were not really obscure, and Michael Moorcock’s Elric novels are not remotely obscure!”

And I apologize — because you’re right. This novel in particular is part of one of the major sword and sorcery series of all time. Yet — as with the The Children of Llyr — it’s a book I myself didn’t read until just now, over 50 years after it first appeared.

Science Fantasy 47, June 1961, containing Michael Moorcock’s “The Dreaming City.” Cover by Brian Lewis

I’m going to delve into the publishing history not just of this book but of all the Elric books, because it gets a bit complicated. The first Elric story, “The Dreaming City,” appeared in the classic British magazine Science Fantasy in June 1961 (shown above). Over the next few years, several more stories appeared there and in Fantastic Stories.

Some of these stories formed a fairly coherent narrative that fundamentally ended with the 1964 story “Doomed Lord’s Passing,” though the publication order of the stories and the internal chronology don’t match at all. The first Elric book, The Stealer of Souls (1963), included mostly stories set somewhat early in the internal chronology, while the second, Stormbringer (1965), included four of the latest stories in internal chronology.

The Stealer of Souls (Lancer Books, 1967). Cover by Jack Gaughan

Beginning in 1970 Moorcock began to expand and reorganize his Elric sequence — first with a collection, The Singing Citadel, that included four of his earlier stories, and then in 1971 with some new work, that eventually included stories set before any of the earlier pieces, as well as stories set at various times in between the already published works.

Later books would include new stories and also stories from the first and third collections reshuffled — though Stormbringer remains the capstone of the whole series. (This chaotic chronology is actually quite appropriate for the themes of the whole series.)

The six-volume Elric Saga by Michael Moorcock (DAW Books). Covers by Michael Whelan

In 1976 and 1977 DAW published a set of six volumes, in internal chronological order, serving at that time as more or less the complete official Elric series, with restored texts and titles preferred by Moorcock. Three more books have been added in the subsequent decades, most recently The Citadel of Forgotten Myths in 2022.

The Vanishing Tower was fourth in the DAW set, and is sixth in the current chronology. It was first published by the New English Library in the UK as The Sleeping Sorceress in 1971, and by Lancer Books in the US in 1972. The DAW edition, from 1977, was the first to use The Vanishing Tower as the title.

The early collection The Singing Citadel, containing the Elric tales
“The Singing Citadel” and “Master of Chaos,” and the Eternal Champion tale
“To Rescue Tanelorn” (Berkley Medallion, August 1970). Cover by Gail Burwen

The novel comprises three closely linked “books,” all concerning Elric attempting to find and kill the evil sorcerer Theleb K’aarna. The first “book,” here called “The Torment of the Last Lord,” was published separately as “The Sleeping Sorceress” in the UK anthology Warlocks and Warriors, also in 1971, and reprinted in the February 1972 issue of Fantastic Stories in the US.

Elric, the tall, gaunt, albino warrior, long since exiled from his home Melniboné, and his sidekick Moonglum, come to the kingdom Lormyr, near the World’s Edge, where they believe they can find Theleb K’aarna.

Fantastic, February 1972, containing the Elric novella “The Sleeping Sorceress. ” Cover by Mike Kaluta

After some travails they happen on an isolated castle — and in it they find a beautiful woman in an enchanted sleep. This is Myshella, and she is another enemy of K’aarna. She, even as she is enchanted, reveals to Elric that Theleb K’aarna has allied with a certain Prince Umbda to attack her castle. If Elric can find a certain pouch Myshella may be able to wake and help Elric and Moonglum in a battle against Prince Umbda and the sorcerer.

Of course they succeed, but only partly, and in the second episode Theleb K’aarna, having miraculously escaped certain death, has come to Nadsokor, the City of Beggars. He has a proposition for the Beggar King, Urish, about the destruction of Elric, for Elric had previously stolen (or reclaimed) something from Urish.

The first two volumes of The Elric Saga omnibus editions from Saga Press: Elric of Melniboné
(February 15, 2022, cover by Brom) and Stormbringer (April 12, 2022, cover by Michael Whelan)

Meanwhile Elric and Moonglum, believing Theleb K’aarna to be dead, plan to go to the eternal city Tanelorn for some rest. But on the way, Elric loses the Ring of Kings to a thief — and soon realizes that the ring is on the way to Nadsokor. And — you guessed it — after some more adventures and perils, Elric and Moonglum are successful — except that Theleb K’aarna escapes again.

The final episode involves another encounter with Theleb K’aarna, who now threatens Tanelorn (and thus many of Elric’s friends.) This is in some ways one of the most interesting parts of the book, for Elric meets some avatars of — himself; which explicitly links this series to Moorcock’s overarching Eternal Champion series, and his “multiverse,” along with characters with the initials JC (and with the Three Who Are One!) There are journeys to other Planes, and a battle alongside Corum and Erekosë, and a bitter reunion with Myshella.

The first US release of The Vanishing Tower, first published as The Sleeping Sorceress
(Lancer Books, September 1972). Cover by Charles Moll

So, what did I think?

I don’t really think this is likely the best place to start with Elric. There are good points — Moorcock’s imagination is fecund, and the character of Elric is a worthwhile counter to traditional Sword and Sorcery heroes like Conan. But on the whole the novel doesn’t do a whole lot. The writing seems hurried — the prose isn’t terrible but it’s a bit slapdash. The action scenes seem run of the mill S&S — there isn’t a lot of suspense, just superhuman swordplay.

It’s not bad stuff, but it’s not special. I can see via the outlines of the entire series why this is a key part of fantasy history. But for me, the Moorcock I want to stick with is stuff like The Dancers at the End of Time — or like the novel up next, Mother London.

Rich Horton’s last article for us was a review of The Children of Llyr by Evangeline Walton. His website is Strange at Ecbatan. Rich has written over 200 articles for Black Gate, see them all here.

MIles (Miloslav) J. Breuer

Miles J. Breuer was born in Chicago on January 3, 1889, but the family moved to Crete, Nebraska when he was four years old so his father could attend medical school. He attended the University of Texas and went on to medical school at Rush Medical Center. He worked as an internist, specializing in tuberculosis at Lincoln General Hospital in Nebraska. He often bylined his work with his credentials as an M.D.

In 1916, he married Julia Strejc and they had three children, Rosalie, Stanley (who died at 18 when he fell from St. Isabel Glacier), and Mildred. During World War I, he served in France and achieved the rank of first lieutenant in the Medical Corps. Upon his return to the U.S., he joined his father’s medical practice and began publishing medical articles in Czech language newspapers and a monthly medical column in a Czech-language agricultural magazine. He published the Index of Physiotherapeutic Technic in 1925, outlining physical therapy practices.

His first English language science fiction story, “The Man with the Strange Head” appeared in the January 1927 issue of Amazing Stories, however, it was previously published as “Muž se zvláštní hlavou” in a Czech language almanac published in Chicago. He also appears to have published “The Man without an Appetite” in the Czech magazine Bratrský věstník in 1916, although it didn’t see English publication until 1963. His Czech stories tended to be published under the name Miloslav J. Breuer, and he continued to publish in Czech throughout his early writing career.

Amazing Stories, 1/27, Cover by Frank R. Paul

The majority of his work, more than two dozen stories, were published within a five year period, with only half that number appearing in the following decade. While his fiction included gadgets and other standard tropes of science fiction of the time, Breuer tended to look at how those things impacted humans rather than focus on the cool gizmos. His earlier works tended to be stronger stories and better written than works he published later in his career.  One of his most famous stories was 1930’s “The Gostak and the Doshes,” whose seemingly nonsensical title became a catch phrase in early fandom.

Breuer collaborated with Jack Williamson on the story “The Girl from Mars” and novel The Birth of a New Republic. The idea for the novel was Breuer’s, with Williamson doing the majority of the writing. He also collaborated with Clare Winger Harris on the story “A Baby on Neptune.”

The majority of Breuer’s fiction was published in either Amazing Stories or Amazing Stories Quarterly, but he did publish “The Problem of Communication” in Astounding, “Mars Colonizes” in Marvel Tales, “The Disappearing Pages” in Future Fiction, and “The Oversight” in Comet.

In 1942, Breuer suffered a nervous breakdown and moved to Los Angeles as a means of giving himself a fresh start, setting up a medical practice there. Breuer died on October 14, 1945 in Los Angeles and is buried in the Los Angeles National Cemetery. His father died the following year.

In 2025, Jaroslav Olsa, Jr. published Dreaming of Autonomous Vehicles: Miroslav (Miles) J. Breuer: Czech-American Writer and the Birth of Science Fiction.

Steven H Silver is a twenty-one-time Hugo Award nominee and was the publisher of the Hugo-nominated fanzine Argentus as well as the editor and publisher of ISFiC Press for eight years. He has also edited books for DAW, NESFA Press, and ZNB. His most recent anthology is Alternate Peace and his novel After Hastings was published in 2020. Steven has chaired the first Midwest Construction, Windycon three times, and the SFWA Nebula Conference numerous times. He was programming chair for Chicon 2000 and Vice Chair of Chicon 7.

In August 2025, we hailed the emergence of a second Chain Story project championed by Michael A. Stackpole. This is a Sword & Sorcery-focused, contagious set of connected (“chained”) stories.

Each is:

• A standalone tale
• Readable in any order
• Free to read!
• Interconnected via a theme involving a Crown

We round up groups every several weeks, but check the Chain Story website. for the latest. Here we highlight the latest set of five, Episodes 19-23:

• 19 Of Crowns & Consequences  by Jason M. Waltz
• 20 The Hunt For Violet Shatterwing by Bryan Young
• 21 Into The Badlands by Alina Lee
• 22  Abhartach’s Castle by Aaron Canton
• 23   A Feast For Pan by James D. Mills

Previous Black Gate posts have chronicled groups of the growing chain:

• The Chain Story 2 – Sword and Sorcery – Episodes 1 – 3 (Aug 2025)
• The Chain Story 2 – Sword and Sorcery – Episodes 4 – 8  (Oct 2025)
• The Chain Story 2 – Sword and Sorcery – Episodes 9 – 13 (Nov 2025)
• The Chain Story 2 — Sword & Sorcery – Episodes 14 – 18 (Feb 2026)

 

Entry Chain Post (Link on Chain site) Story (Link to Free version) Author Abstract 23 March 25, 2026 A Feast For Pan James D. Mills IN THE WASTES, ALL ARE FODDER FOR PAN. In a return to the world of SOIL and Ashen Rider, Hromgir and Arvid of Clan Sparrow are on the run after a raid gone wrong. Braving the frozen wastes of the northern coast, they must reach the mountain pass to escape the Wystran riders close on their heels. Hiding from the riders, they take shelter in the depths of a strange cave, unearthing otherworldly horrors better left buried…. 22 March 11, 2026 Abhartach’s Castle Aaron Canton A trio of student witches head off on a dangerous adventure to obtain a powerful artifact—aiming to retrieve it and keep it out of the hands of sinister forces.
Unexpectedly they meet opposition in the form of a classmate they’d once all considered a friend, but who has become a most dangerous foe. 21 February 25, 2026 Into The Badlands Alina Lee Rowan Grim’s world is one which is long on places you don’t want to travel to, and few people return from. But what is out there draws her, and she willingly embraces the challenges which have devoured so many others. 20 February 9, 2026 The Hunt For Violet Shatterwing Bryan Young Now returned to Nightfall Forest, and in the company of the fox bard Ashley, Pip finds the hamlet of Riveroak ablaze. The mouse knight, his war cat, and companion race to quench the fires and hunt the leader of the crow cult, intent on putting an end to her evil. 19 January 28, 2026 Of Crowns & Consequences Jason M. Waltz Direk, wielder of the magickal sword Retribution, has been dispatched to destroy an old enemy at the behest of his King. In his pursuit he encounters a newly awakened power which challenges his knowledge of the world, and threatens to up end all he knows to be true. 18 January 19, 2026 The Sapphire and the Sorceress Bryan Young As with all good heroes, Pip does not shrink from danger and adventure. Still, there are times when it would be good to relax at home. But Pip is far from home, and is searching for a powerful sorceress who can help him on his way. 17 January 14, 2026 Terror Above Icehenge Malcolm T. North To reach her, however, he’ll have to venture through the Chaos Realm and, as every true hero knows if you undertake that journey lightly, it will end quickly. But Pip has no choice, and therein our adventure begins. 16 December 31, 2025 Demonfire: A Tale of Shintaro Oba  C. L. Werner A forbidden ritual conducted in secret, bathed in blood and death enables a demon to grasp unimaginable power—the power to destroy all enemies and raise himself above all others. 15 December 24, 2025 In The Land of the Giants, Bryan Young A Samurai, whose duty calls for him to hunt down such a creature. A destiny he must pursue even as the world burns around him. 14 December 10, 2025 Blight Katherine Monasterio Forest Ranger Hazel Boncliff is a Green Speaker, a person with the magical ability to commune with plants. When the king summons Hazel and her assistant to the capital to heal the strange blight affecting his hunting grounds, she’s reluctant to help—least of all because he’s insisting his inexperienced secretary go along for the journey. But with a reward she can’t refuse and the blight’s effects more harrowing by the moment, she’ll take all the help she can get. 13 November 26, 2025 Ice Hawk’s Aerie, Bryan Young A chance meeting in the dark forest. A tale of woe and injustice.
Pip Strongpaw, the last of the fabled Great Catriders, must once again wield the runed-sword Feathersbane, to end the chilling menace threatening to destroy the hamlet of Riveroak. A menace of sorcerous origins against which even the bravest of heroes may not prevail. 12 November 12, 2025 Blood for the River Michael Stackpole Chased into a swamp by homicidal cultists, Kellach and Serinna encounter a fire mage who saves their lives, and then leads them on an adventure that is sure to get them killed. 11 October 14, 2025 Of Nightmares & Jewels Robert Greenberger Something drew the mage onward, always toward the northwest, through restless evenings and dark dreams of ill portent. Yet when Jareth’s traveling companion, the swordswoman Talin, asks him why, he has no idea.
And then they reached a tiny town at the edge of nowhere, wherein lurked an evil with roots sunk deep in times beyond remembering; an evil that has chosen their visit as a time to awaken. 10 October 14, 2025 The Cursed Cuff Aaron Rosenberg She came to them spinning a tale of woe. An army of undead lay siege to the Manor she called home. She had barely escaped and sough adventurers brave enough to free her people.
But to do that Birr Blackjaw and his companions would have to wrest an ancient artifact from the hands of a cult leader who had his own army, and a hellish pet none could hope to defeat. 9 October 1, 2025 The Monastery Plot Bryan Young Shield Maiden and legendary sleuth Sister Agatha, accompanied by her faithful initiate, Brother Dominguez, sought to enjoy peace and quiet at  the Monastery of St. Maryam.Despite their desires, they soon find themselves investigating twin murders. Murders which become all that much more bizarre when the name Tarru-Syn turns up, and their search leads them into the very bowels of the earth, to face a foe from beyond their reality. 8 September 24, 2025 On Memories Michael Stackpole Dancillius Hrekt is fairly new to the world of Monster Fighting. All he wants to do is to make a good impression with his peers.  And all they want is for  him and his best friend to die. 7 September 10, 2025 The Village of Morvoss Thomas Grayfson In this new Kavion adventure, our tormented knight clings to the last threads of family and sanity as he navigates the mysterious Village of Morvoss. Haunted by fractured memories, he must confront the darkness around him—and within. 6 August 27, 2025 Fragment of a Sorcerous Crown Joan Marie Verba In this tale from the Chronicles of the Library of Sorcery, the sorcerers investigate a dangerous magical artifact of mysterious origin. Can the sorcerers uncover the truth?Sorcerer Serena is called to investigate an enormous, carnivorous plant. She finds that a mysterious magical artifact is behind the phenomenon. To find out where the artifact came from and what its properties might be, she consults the Library of Sorcery, where she uncovers the answers, but not on the Library shelves. Can the artifact be banished from the sorcerous regions before it becomes a more deathly threat? 5 August 13, 2025 Grave’s Brood S.E. Lindberg Doktor Grave sends Brood to recover a crown from the Red Orchard, only for Brood to find it is the source of a bloody plague caused by Grave’s experiments. Facing vampiric plants and their loyal clan, Brood must confront his past and question whether he can trust Grave or escape the nightmare himself. 4 July 28, 2025 Shard of Song Rigel Ailur Two wizards search desperately for a way to stave off a vicious magical-musical attack before the dragons succumb.  A powerful relic ancient beyond memory calls to them, but do they dare use it? 3 July 16, 2025 Forest of the Fallen Colossus Bryan Young A dying robber hands Laila and Zaki a mysterious artifact in the middle of a fae-haunted wood. “Danger,” the robber manages before dying. Suddenly sister and brother find themselves safeguarding an unwanted gift—on the run for their lives in the Forest of the Fallen Colossus. 2 July 3, 2025 Death Grip Michael Stackpole The man hadn’t died easily.A smoking hole sat where his heart should have been. Terror twisted his features, and he clutched an emerald reeking of magick as if would somehow save him. Neryon and Magistrate-Martial Logan find themselves in a race to find the killer before he has a chance to harvest more victims. But, with the amount of power used on his first target, there was a big gulf between finding and stopping; and no guarantee he wouldn’t kill them, too. 1 July 3, 2025 Blade of the Storm Witch Robert E. Vardeman Her vengeance became elemental! The Conqueror-King’s minion murdered her pirate husband.  The Lady Rennata was condemned to follow him into a watery grave—until wind and wave swept her to a magical blade that commands all of Nature.

 

S.E. Lindberg is a Managing Editor at Black Gate, regularly reviewing books and interviewing authors on the topic of “Beauty & Art in Weird-Fantasy Fiction.” He has taken lead roles organizing the Gen Con Writers’ Symposium (chairing it in 2023), is the lead moderator of the Goodreads Sword & Sorcery Group, and was an intern for Tales from the Magician’s Skull magazine. As for crafting stories, he has contributed eight entries across Perseid Press’s Heroes in Hell and Heroika series, and has an entry in Weirdbook Annual #3: Zombies. He independently publishes novels under the banner Dyscrasia Fiction; short stories of Dyscrasia Fiction have appeared in Whetstone Amateur S&S Magazine, Swords & Sorcery online magazine, Rogues In the House Podcast’s A Book of Blades Vol I & II, DMR’s Terra Incognita, the 9th issue of Tales From the Magician’s Skull, Savage Realms Magazine, and Michael Stackpole’s S&S Chain Story 2 Project. 

Bigfoot: Sword of the Earthman Volume 1, collecting issues 1 – 6 (Action Lab Entertainment, August 2, 2016)

Dipping back into the Sword & Planet genre for the day, here’s one of the odder items I have. Bigfoot: Sword of the Earthman, subtitled as “The Galaxy’s Greatest Action-Adventure Hero.” As far as I can tell, Josh Henaman is the writer, with Andy Taylor (Penciller), Tamra Bonvillain (Colorist), and Adam Wollet (Letterer).

This is a graphic novel collecting the first six issues of the story. I bought this because it was billed as sword & planet set on Mars, and featuring Bigfoot. It mostly was, although not quite what I was hoping it might be.

Issues 1-6 of Bigfoot: Sword of the Earthman (Brew House Comics editions, 2012-2014)

I gave it 3 1/2 stars, although at current I don’t have plans to buy the later material in the series.

The idea was quite good, if — of course — pretty far out there. Bigfoot somehow gets transported to an ancient Mars and becomes a hero. The art was good as well, although I’m not completely familiar with the comic reading process so I couldn’t always tell what was going on from the art. Maybe readers more familiar with the art form could.

A page from Bigfoot: Sword of the Earthman, issue #4. Art by Andy Taylor and Tamra Bonvillain

The story has a tremendous amount of narration from the point of view of a Martian character who follows Bigfoot through the tale and relates the events, but he’s pretty clearly an unreliable narrator, which makes it difficult to know what is really happening. Bigfoot doesn’t talk at all, which was fine for a while but began to get a little old as the tale continued.

The book is called Sword of the Earthman, that being Bigfoot, but there’s very little sword slinging action through most of the book. Only in the last chapter do we really see Bigfoot cut lose and there is a lot of action. I was prepared to go with 3 stars until that ending chapter, which had much less narration and much more action, and some pretty good emotional moments as well as a surprise ending. If more of the book had been like that last chapter I’d have ranked it higher.

Charles Gramlich administers The Swords & Planet League group on Facebook, where this post first appeared. His last article for us was a a review of the 1994 horror anthology Young Blood. See all of his recent posts for Black Gate here.

Robin Hood (Universal Pictures, 2010) Robin Hood (Unrated Director’s Cut) (156 minutes; 2010)

Written by Brian Helgeland. Directed by Ridley Scott.

What is it?

What it is, is a criminally underrated film.

Maybe it would’ve been more successful if they had titled it Robin Hood Begins.

Another option, though it probably wouldn’t have helped at the box office, is Kingdom of Heaven II.

Because it is both of those things, and more.

Robin in action

It’s a backdoor sequel to Kingdom of Heaven. That movie ended with Richard the Lionheart stopping by Orlando Bloom’s village in France, on his way to Crusade in the Holy Land. This film begins with Richard on his way back home.

And it maintains the primary theme of that film, which is that what makes a man a man is not what organization he is affiliated with or what title he bears, but what he chooses to do every day.

It’s also an origin story for Robin Hood. Essentially, it’s a prequel to every other Robin Hood movie. It begins with him serving in Richard’s army, and follows him right up to the very moment he’s declared an outlaw by King John.

Cate Blanchett as Marion Loxley

The cast is spectacularly good. Mark Strong is ideal for a medieval English villain. Galadriel is a beautiful Maid Marian who is also strong and smart and tough. Lea Seydoux, of the last two James Bond films, is a radiant French princess. Oscar Isaac is always good in everything but is enjoyably evil here as Prince John. The main Merry Men are cool but never get anywhere near enough to do. A young Matthew McFadyen makes a fine, evil sheriff of Nottingham – though he, too, barely appears in the film.

William Hurt plays a completely useless character who takes up precious run time that could’ve been given to Little John or the Sheriff. He spends a lot of time looking on in disappointment at Prince John’s missteps, but does nothing.

Russell Crowe in Robin Hood

Russell Crowe’s Robin Hood here is hard as nails, incredibly competent and confident, a natural leader and a charismatic force.

I love that this version of Robin Hood is an impostor. He’s not Robin of Loxley. He’s a guy who finds Robin of Loxley being ambushed in the French forest and takes his place. And his identity.

Mark Strong as Sir Godfrey

Yes, Robin of Loxley becomes the first victim of identity theft.

It’s a fine movie overall, as long as you understand what you’re getting and what you’re not getting. There should’ve been a sequel that actually showed the adventures of Robin Hood and the Merry Men now that they’re established as outlaws. One was planned, anyway, but never filmed. Lacking that, the film fails to deliver what audiences could reasonably expect. In addition, the ending is something of a downer, though it does leave the door wide open for further adventures by Robin Hood, as well as establishing a need for those adventures to happen.

Kevin Durand as Little John in Robin Hood Noteworthy

This movie did not do well among critics or at the box office.

It brought in just under $322 million worldwide – not a disaster, but not a big hit, either.

Its Rotten Tomatoes score is just 43%. Critics praised its production values and acting, but simply didn’t find it very much fun.

Ridley Scott directs Robin Hood

A good comparison might be found in the Western genre, and particularly in Wyatt Earp movies. Tombstone is bold and colorful and fun, while Kevin Costner’s Wyatt Earp is probably more true to actual history, but is also more somber, serious and flat.

Ridley Scott’s Robin Hood has more in common with Costner’s Earp movie than with Tombstone.

I suspect audiences were disappointed because they expected some version of Costner’s Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves movie (1991), which was silly and cartoonish but also more fun.

Errol Flynn’s The Adventures of Robin Hood (Warner Bros. Pictures, May 14, 1938)

Or perhaps Errol Flynn’s The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) raised the bar (and set audience expectations) too high, decades ago.

If you’re looking for Robin and his Merry Men chasing the Sheriff of Nottingham through Sherwood Forest while robbing from the rich and giving to the poor, well, I have to tell you – this is not that movie. Not at all.

This is a movie about commoners with uncommon valor rising up and taking the place of noblemen at first by pretending to be them, and then through their deeds and their actions.

Robin and his Merry Men

And it’s about one extremely arrogant and stubborn jerk who happens to inherit the crown of England.

In 2026, Russell Crowe noted that the original plan was to make three films, continuing into the better-known Robin Hood material. Unfortunately, this one didn’t meet the financial number necessary to trigger the sequels.

Russell Crowe in Robin Hood Quick and Dirty Summary

Russell Crowe and his pals are archers fighting their way across France alongside King Richard the Lionheart, on their way back to England from the Crusades.

Crowe and Company get fed up with Richard’s vanity and his endless battles. They decide to desert and go home. At the same moment, Richard is killed in battle.

When Robin of Loxley is killed in an ambush while trying to bring Richard’s crown home, Crowe and his men take up the task, impersonating noblemen in the process.

Robin and Marion

Once back in England, they get caught up in the brewing civil war surrounding Prince John. Meanwhile, Crowe’s character, pretending to be Robin, meets and becomes involved with Maid Marian.

There are also a number of very good moments in which the scenery-chewing Oscar Isaac preens about while ignoring his wife and mother and sleeping with a beautiful French princess (Seydoux).

Léa Seydoux and Oscar Isaac in Robin Hood

This all sounds very Robin Hood-ish. But then we are served up an entirely separate plot involving Sir Godfrey (Strong), a traitor who’s helping the French king invade England.

Eventually Crowe’s character – I honestly don’t know what to call him; he’s not really Robin of Loxley and he’s not “Robin Hood” yet, instead going by “Robin Longstride” — reconciles with King John long enough to repulse the French invasion. But John being John, the situation reverts quickly afterward. The movie ends right where we expect the Robin Hood story to begin. Indeed, the last words we see on the screen before the credits roll are, “And so the legend begins.”

Russell Crowe in Robin Hood Fantasy/SF/Sword & Sorcery Elements

As one might expect, the weapons that feature in this film are bows and arrows.

A crossbow bolt through the neck kills Richard in much the same way it killed the big German Crusader early in Kingdom of Heaven.

Robin Whateverhisnameis gets a few opportunities to show off his archery skills – but not many. Not nearly enough for a film about allegedly one of the greatest archers to ever string a bow.

Robin and his bow High Point

The best portion of the film is probably when Robin decides to impersonate the slain Loxley. Suddenly he and the handful of Merry-Men-to-be traveling with him morph into “heist film” characters. Robin’s Eleven.

And speaking of stealing, of course Isaac as the deluded King John steals every scene he’s in, often just with his facial expressions.

Max von Sydow as Sir Walter Loxley Low Point

There’s a long segment in the middle of the film where Robin and company have settled into Marian’s farm, and then not a lot happens that’s very exciting. We do get some fun appearances here by the great Max von Sydow as Sir Walter Loxley, the father of the man Crowe is impersonating. What’s a Medieval action film without von Sydow??

But beyond him, it’s a pretty dry middle of the movie, and it’s easy for audiences to tune out during this section.

Oscar Isaac as the ridiculously evil Prince John Standout Performance

There are several good performances, but I’d argue that Oscar Isaac as the ridiculously evil and treacherous Prince/King John takes the cake. He’s the “Hans Gruber” of this movie. Yippee-ki-yay, Robin Hooder!

Matthew Macfadyen as the Sheriff of Nottingham Overall Evaluation as a Movie and as Fantasy/SF/Sword & Sorcery

It’s not precisely a Sword & Sorcery movie per se, but it is S&S-adjacent, featuring a mythical main character who is essentially a Fantasy hero.

It’s a very creditable unofficial sequel to Kingdom of Heaven, by the same director and featuring some of the same supporting actors.

And while it has its slow sections and doesn’t really give us the Robin Hood we probably went into it looking for, it does give us a very fine Medieval warfare and intrigue movie, as well as the prequel to the actual Robin Hood story we never knew we needed.

Put that in yer Magna Carta, ya bastards!

Van Allen Plexico once edited an anthology of tales set in a Thundarr-style post-apocalyptic future of super-science and sorcery, called Blackthorne: Thunder on Mars. He is a member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA), a Grand Master of Pulp Literature (2025 class) and a multiple-award-winning author of more than two dozen novels and anthologies, ranging from space opera to Kaiju to crime fiction to superheroes to military SF. Find his works on Amazon and at www dot Plexico dot net.

It’s been over a month since I shared a Ten Things? Heavens to Murgatroyd (any Snagglepuss fans out there?).

I talked here about how fed I up I was with all the streaming apps which I needed to watch different things. Including sports. So, except for Prime (the family orders a lot of stuff from Amazon), I cut the cord on all of them. I’m missing Daredevil, and didn’t watch a single Pittsburgh Penguins playoff game (I did listen to all of them). But it’s going fine.

PlutoTV, and RokuTV, have lots of shows and movies for free. But Tubi (also free) has really been filling the gap. Last week I wrote about the Coen Brothers’ classic, The Hudsucker Proxy. That was a Tubi viewing. I just watched the 1988 Blake Edwards Western, Sunset. Bruce Willis is cowboy actor Tom Mix, and James Garner is Wyatt Earp, in a Hollywood Western murder mystery. It was okay, but I’ll always watch Garner when I can. Tubi has TV shows too (that will be another post), including some fun cartoons, like Pinky and the Brain.

But here are ten movies you should check out for free on Tubi. Of course, there are well-known flicks like Rain Man, Legally Blonde, The Untouchables, The Graduate, Bull Durham, etc. But I wanted to talk about some that maybe you haven’t thought of in a while.

1 – SUPPORT YOUR LOCAL SHERIFF

I mentioned James Garner already, right? This is Galaxy Quest for Westerns. There was a non-sequel followup, with several of the same actors, in a similar story, but Support Your Local Gunfighter has different characters (granted, doing the same things).

This is one of my five favorite Westerns, and I’ve watched it many times. Garner is a mix of Bret Maverick and Jim Rockford in this 1969 movie. I’d install the Tubi app just to watch this one. If you like it, you should definitely watch Gunfighter as well.

2 – A SHOT IN THE DARK

Peter Sellers introduced us to Inspector Clouseau in 1963. The Return of the Pink Panther didn’t come out until 1975 (Alan Arkin played the role in a 1968 movie). Seems people forget that in 1964, A Shot in the Dark hit theaters only six months after The Pink Panther.

This is my favorite Pink Panther movie, and I developed a lifelong crush on Elke Sommer from this one. Tubi has all the Sellers ones, the two ‘official ones’ without him, the two Steve Martin reboots, and a couple of the cartoon series’. Everything but the Alan Arkin one. Clouseau is a supporting character in the first movie. I much prefer A Shot in the Dark.

3 – GET SHORTY

This is a superb book by Elmore Leonard. And the 1995 adaptation starring John Travolta, Gene Hackman, Renee Russo, Danny Devito (and the always underappreciated Dennis Farina) nailed it. It’s one of the best book/movie adaptations around. The sequel – Be Cool – is good, though not great. Both are worth watching.

Prime did a streaming series in 2017 with Chris O’Dowd (The IT Crowd) and Ray Romano. It ran for three seasons and I think it’s terrific. It sets up with the basic premise of the novel, but is basically an original story after that. Which is fine with me. I loved every episode. I talked about it here. So, book, movie, and series: you should check out Get Shorty.

4 – EIGHT MEN OUT

Baseball snobs like to immediately attack the inaccuracies of Eliot Asinof’s book. Whatever. I’m a fan of the book. And this is a top five baseball movie. The cast is deep, and visually it’s got that baseball nostalgia factor. And I think it conveys the almost slave-like conditions under the reserve clause (I’m pro-management, not pro-union; though both sides are greedy twits that may ruin the game again. But the options were to take what owners offered, or quit. That was it).

I recommend reading the book, but this is a movie absolutely worth watching.

5 – ARMED AND DANGEROUS

There are several John Candy movies. While he was pretty much always good for a laugh, his movies are hit and miss. It’s fine if you liked Canadian Bacon, Who’s Harry Crumb?, and Hostage for a Day. But as with Humphrey Bogart, he did make some stinkers.

But Candy and Eugene Levy do make Armed and Dangerous a good one. Meg Ryan, Robert Loggia, and Brion Jones join in this Harold Ramis scripted flick. A fired cop (Candy) and an inept lawyer (Levy) are forced to join a corrupt union when they get jobs as security guards. Co-written by Stacy Keach’s brother James, their father makes an appearance.

I always thought this was underappreciated John Candy. I’ve never seen It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time, but I’m going to check it out. On Tubi.

6 – DEAD RECKONING

And speaking of my favorite actor of all time…Dead Reckoning is a ‘good but not great’ hardboiled Noir starring Bogie. WW II parachutist Rip Murdock’s (Bogart) buddy goes AWOL rather than receive the Medal of Honor. Bogie looks for him and murder and mayhem follow. Lizabeth Scott is a femme fatale, and Morris Carnovsky is the bad guy club owner.

Bogie made a slew of good movies in the forties, and this is one of them. It’s not on a par with The Maltese Falcon, This Gun for Hire, or Murder My Sweet, but it’s still a good example of the hardboiled genre. Like Johnny O’Clock, or Nocturne.

7 – SOLOMON KANE

I commented that Dark Winds was a good 70s cop show, but not good Tony Hillerman. I feel similarly about Solomon Kane. I like it as a sword and sorcery movie, but it’s a long way from Robert E. Howard’s Puritan avenger of wrongs. And that’s fine. They could have made a bad Solomon Kane movie, and then it would be a total loss.

James Purefoy is good, and he wanted to do a followup. But since the movie didn’t even get an American release (it eventually found it’s way over here with limited showing, but it was well over, and the International take didn’t make back even half of the budget).

Solomon Kane could have been truer to Howard’s character and stories. Noting the distinction between sword and sorcery, and fantasy, this is an S&S movie definitely worth watching.

8 -PRESUMED INNOCENT

There were others who did legal thrillers, before John Grisham (I’m a big fan of Richard North Patterson), but he clearly ‘took things to another level’ with his books, and the movies from them. Scott Turow’s Presumed Innocent was a successful film, with Harrison Ford. Tom Cruise’s The Firm followed a year later.

This is a very good legal thriller. Turow continued to write best-selling books (check out The Burden of Proof, featuring the defense attorney from Presumed Innocent). The movie has a real twist at the end. Good book, good film. And it’s free on Tubi.

9 – HOLLYWOOD KNIGHTS

I don’t think there’s ever been another movie like Animal House. It’s a unique classic. But if I had to name one movie to join it in that solo club, it would be Hollywood Knights. Set around the hijinks of a car club in Beverly Hills on Halloween night.

It was Robert Wuhl’s first movie, and he was SO terrific that a band named themselves after his character, Newbomb Turk. With several now-familiar faces, it’s got more of an Animal House vibe than any other movie I’ve seen. Since it’s free on Tubi, you REALLY should catch this if you’re a fan of that kind of humor.

10 – CADENCE

The number 165 US box office movie of 1991 may be the best little flick you’ve not seen. Charlie Sheen is put in a US military prison in West Germany, run by martin Sheen. Lawrence Fishburne is the leader of the other prisoners – all black. I only just now realized Charlie’s brother Ramon is also in it.

Martin is a miserable SOB and Charlie has to deal with the other prisoners, as well as the commander. This gets bad reviews, but I really like it. And Harry Stewart (‘Cornbread’ in the movie) sings a song called End of My Journey. It’s absolutely gorgeous. I often cite That Thing You Do! as a terrific little movie many people overlook. But it’s still got the Tom Hanks name on it. Cadence is one even fans of the Sheen family may not know of. And you absolutely should check it out on Tubi.

BONUS FLICK

11 – AWAKENINGS

I saw this movie at the theater, back in 1990. I haven’t watched it since. But I remember that I teared up at the end. One year after Dead Poets Society – and three years before Mrs. Doubtfire – Robin Williams is a neurosurgeon, trying to break through to victims of Parkinson’s Disease. Robert DeNiro is one of his patients. There’s a bit of humor in this movie, but it’s a medical drama. And damn, it hits HARD. My mom told me this past weekend that she’s remembering less and less. Parkinson’s fucking sucks.

John Heard, Anne Meara, and Penelope Ann Miller fill in a solid cast. But this movie is a tour de force for DeNiro, with Williams showing his acting chops. If you want a powerful drama, give this a watch. And maybe have some tissues handy.

MORE

I could list a couple dozen more movies – good and maybe not so good – you can sit down and watch: Deal of the Century, The Big Store, The Boondock Saints, Point Break, Mulholland Falls, The Majestic, The Thee Amigos, The In-Laws, Meatballs, Clerks II, Crossroads, Krull, Runaway: Just scroll and you’ll find things from every genre.

I loved the twist at the end, of No Way Out. I have it on VCR in a box somewhere. I think I’m gonna watch it on Tubi. And maybe The Getaway, and China Moon. And as I mentioned, you can deep dive into a plethora of TV shows. I just added Hardcastle and McCormick to my ever-growing list.

I do watch stuff from RokuTV, and PlutoTV. But I have really leaned into Tubi since canceling my streaming apps. And I’m quite happy with the decision.

Some previous entries on things to watch:

The Hudsucker Proxy
Let’s Go to the Movies:1996
Firefly – The Animated Reboot
What I’ve Been Watching – February 2026 (The Night Manager, SS-GB, Best Medicine)
What I’ve Been Watching – October 2026 (Return to Paradise, Lynley, Expend4bles, and more)
What I’ve Been Watching – August 2025 (Ballard, Resident Alien, Twisted Metal, and more)
What I’ve Been Watching – May 2025 (County Line, The Bondsman, Bosch: Legacy)
What I’ve Been Watching – October 2024 (What We Do in the Shadows, The Bay, Murder in a Small Town)
What I’m Watching – November 2023 (Brooklyn Nine-Nine, The Caine Mutiny Court Martial, A Haunting in Venice)
What I’m Watching – April 2023 (Florida Man, Picard – season three, The Mandalorian)
The Pale Blue Eye, and The Glass Onion: Knives Out
Tony Hillerman’s Dark Winds
The Rings of Power (Series I wrote on this show – all links at this one post)
What I’m Watching – December 2022 (Frontier, Leverage: Redemption)
What I’m Watching – November 2022 (Tulsa King, Andor, Fire Country, and more)
What I’m Watching – September 2022 (Galavant, Firefly, She-Hulk, and more)
What I’m Watching- April 2022 (Outer Range, Halo, Why Didn’t They Ask Evans, and more)
When USA Network was Kicking Major Butt (Monk, Psych, Burn Notice)
You Should be Streaming These Shows (Corba Kai, The Expanse, Bosch, and more)
What I’m BritBoxing – December 2021 (Death in Paradise, Shakespeare & Hathaway, The Blake Mysteries, and more)
To Boldly Go – Star Treking – (Various Star Trek incarnations)
What I’ve Been Watching – August 2021 (Monk, The Tomorrow War, In Plain Sight, and more)
What I’m Watching – June 2021 (Get Shorty, Con Man, Thunder in Paradise, and more)
Tucker and Dale vs. Evil
What I’ve Been Watching – June 2021 (Relic Hunter, Burn Notice, Space Force, and more)
Appaloosa
Psych of the Dead
The Mandalorian
What I’m Watching: 2020 – Part Two (My Name is Bruce, Sword of Sherwood Forest, Isle of Fury, and more)
What I’m Watching 2020: Part One (The Adventures of Brisco County Jr, Poirot, Burn Notice, and more)
Philip Marlowe: Private Eye
Leverage
Nero Wolfe – The Lost Pilot
David Suchet’s ‘Poirot’
Sherlock Holmes (over two dozen TV shows and movies)

Bob Byrne’s ‘A (Black) Gat in the Hand’ made its Black Gate debut in 2018 and has returned every summer since.

His ‘The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes’ column ran every Monday morning at Black Gate from March, 2014 through March, 2017. And he irregularly posts on Rex Stout’s gargantuan detective in ‘Nero Wolfe’s Brownstone.’ He is a member of the Praed Street Irregulars, and founded www.SolarPons.com (the only website dedicated to the ‘Sherlock Holmes of Praed Street’).

He organized Black Gate’s award-nominated ‘Discovering Robert E. Howard’ series, as well as the award-winning ‘Hither Came Conan’ series. Which is now part of THE Definitive guide to Conan. He also organized 2023’s ‘Talking Tolkien.’

He has contributed stories to The MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories — Parts III, IV, V, VI, XXI, and XXXIII.

He has written introductions for Steeger Books, and appeared in several magazines, including Black Mask, Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine, The Strand Magazine, and Sherlock Magazine.

You can definitely ‘experience the Bobness’ at Jason Waltz’s ’24? in 42′ podcast.

 

 

So it was, but it is said that in recompense Mandos gave to Beren and to Lúthien thereafter a long span of life and joy, and they wandered knowing thirst nor cold in the fair land of Beleriand, and no mortal Man thereafter spoke to Beren or his spouse.

from The Quenta Silmarillion

When I wrote about The Silmarillion last year, without much detail, I described the story of Beren and Lúthien as the great love story of Middle-earth. Inspired by Prof. Tolkien’s love for his wife, Edith, as well as the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, its narrative is integral to the events of The Lord of the Rings. Aragorn’s lineage goes straight back down the millennia to the couple, as does Elrond’s.

Christopher Tolkien, continuing the great work he undertook to edit and publish the greatest portion of his father’s work developing the myths, legends, and tales of Middle-earth, published three books brining a jeweler’s eye to the three great tales contained with The Silmarillion; The Children of  Húrin (2007), Beren and Lúthien (2017), and The Fall of Gondolin (2018). Much more than with The Children of Húrin, Beren and Lúthien digs deeply into the evolution of the story, presenting multiple versions and commentary.

To begin, Beren is the only survivor of a band of human survivors from the great battle where the Dark Lord, Morgoth, destroyed the greater element of the army of elves and men that had kept him trapped in his realm. After the battle, Beren, his father, and ten other men, fought as outlaws against the Morgoth’s forces, until they were betrayed. All save Beren are killed.

After many great deeds and trials, Beren flees south and comes into the hidden elf kingdom of Doriath. There he spies Luthien, daughter of the king of Doriath, dancing, and is enchanted. She in turn sees Beren, and both fall in love. Her father, King Thingol, refuses to give his daughter’s hand in marriage to a mortal. Only if he could bring back one of the Silmarils, the great jewels forged by Feanor, from the crown of Morgoth, would he consent.

Though obviously a task considered impossible, Beren and a band of elves set out to try. They never even make it to the land of Morgoth, instead, being intercepted by his lieutenant, Sauron. Though imprisoned and tortured, they never reveal who they really are or what they’re doing so close to the Dark Lord’s lands. One by one, trapped in Sauron’s dungeon, they are devoured by his great wolves.

Meanwhile, after surviving trials of her own and gaining the friendship of the mighty dog, Huan, Lúthien arrives at Sauron’s keep in search of Beren. Huan kills the wolves and werewolves of Sauron, while with her own powerful magic, Lúthien overcomes Sauron and frees Beren.

Lúthien’s dance before Morgoth and his court by Alan Lee

They return to Doriath, but Beren is still intent on recovering a Silmaril from Morgoth. He again sets out into the terrible lands of the Dark Lord but struggles with despair and loneliness. When he sings a song of great sorrow, Lúthien and Huan hear it and come to him. Disguised as a werewolf and vampire, they steal into Angband, Morgoth’s fortress. Revealing her true self, Lúthien offers to dance and sing for the Dark Lord. It is a dance woven through with powerful magic and puts all of his court of evil to sleep. Beren then pries a Silmaril from the slumbering enemy’s crown. Only when he tries to take a second one, he rouses their foes and must flee.

And she beguiled Morgoth, even as his heart plotted foul evil within him; and she danced before him, and cast all his court in sleep; and she sang to him, and she flung the magic robe she had woven in Doriath in his face, and she set a binding dream upon him—what song can sing the marvel of that deed, or the wrath and humiliation of Morgoth, for even the Orcs laugh in secret when they remember it, telling how Morgoth fell from his chair and his iron crown rolled upon the floor.

The great wolf, Carcharoth, bred especially to defeat Huan, chases and attacks. Beren tries to ward off the beast with the Silmaril, but it bites off his hand and swallows the jewel. Immediately, the gem causes the beast such pain that it drives it mad and charges off, bringing terror and horror wherever it runs.

Too swift for thought his onset came,
too swift for any spell to tame;
and Beren desperate then aside
thrust Lúthien, and forth did stride
unarmed, defenceless to defend
Tinúviel until the end.
With left hand he caught at hairy throat,
with right, from which the radiance welled
of the holy Silmaril he held.
As gleam of swords in fire there flashed
the fangs of Carcharoth, and crashed
together like a trap, that tore
the hand about the wrist, and shore
through brittle bone and sinew nesh,
devouring the frail mortal flesh;
and in that cruel mouth unclean
engulfed the jewel’s holy sheen.

On returning to Doriath, when Thingol learns that a Silmaril was indeed stolen from Morgoth, he relents and allows Beren to marry Lúthien. When the wolf, mad with pain, enters the kingdom, a party, including Beren and Thingol sets off to hunt it. The wolf is finally killed, but only after mortally wounding Beren and Huan. Overcome with grief, Lúthien dies from sorrow. When her spirit arrives in the Halls of the Dead, she sings a song of such beauty and power that she and her husband are returned to life, to live out their days as mortals.

This is the way the story of Beren and Lúthien emerged finally in the pages of The Silmarillion. It did not start out that way and cataloguing the numerous ways it evolved and mutated is what Christopher Tolkien set out to do with this little volume. It is an interesting book, though, without having read The Silmarillion I imagine it would make little sense.

The earliest version, and the most drastically different, began in 1917 as The Tale of Tinúviel. It’s far more like a fairy tale than the epic style of Tolkien’s later writing. Beren is not a man, instead a Gnome. In these early tales, the great elves later called Noldor, go by this name, which Tolkien linked to the Greek word for thought or intelligence. With images of Huygen’s and Poortvliet’s red-capped little fellows appearing in my head at every appearance of the word, it was a bit disconcerting.

Tevildo by Alan Lee

The cat, of course, doesn’t help. What cat you ask? Well, instead of Sauron, the enemy who imprisons him is Tevildo, a great cat with a retinue of lesser cats at his side. On its own, it works well creating a real fairytale atmosphere, but as part of the lore of Middle-earth it lacks the necessary deeper, darker shading.

Beren is less determined than he’ll eventually be portrayed, but as in all the story’s variations, Lúthien takes on the Orphean role and risks great harm to save him. As the tale evolves, she is clearly Tolkien’s great heroine. Beren bolts forward with the subtlety of an angry bull, unable to restrain himself and think things through. She is always thoughtful, ever planning, and wise and clever in ways that can actually trick the great powers of evil in her path.

Later, Tolkien began reworking the tale into an epic poem, The Lay of Leithian. Unfinished, it still runs to 14 of the planned 17 cantos and is over 4200 lines long. It is much more in line with The Silmarillion‘s version of Lúthien’s and Beren’s tale than the earlier version. Beren is now a man. This means the tragic aspect of an immortal falling in love with a mortal appears for the first time. The malignant feline, Tevildo, has been replaced with Thû, a formative version of Sauron. I appreciate the great effort the professor made in writing the poem, but I prefer the finished prose form.

The most interesting thing learned from reading is that this, and the rest of what’s contained in The Silmarillion, are the stories Tolkien wanted to write after the success of The Hobbit. According to his son,

In October he said in a letter to Stanley Unwin, the chairman of Allen and Unwin, that he was ‘a little perturbed. I cannot think of anything more to say about hobbits. Mr Baggins seems to have exhibited so fully both the Took and the Baggins side of their nature. But I have only too much to say, and much already written, about the world into which the hobbit intruded.’ He said that he wanted an opinion on the value of these writings on the subject of ‘the world into which the hobbit intruded’; and he put together a collection of manuscripts and sent them off to Stanley Unwin on 15 November 1937. Included in the collection was QS II, which had reached the moment when Beren took into his hand the Silmaril which he had cut from Morgoth’s crown.

Only later did he land on satisfactory artistic solution:

‘I offered them the legends of the Elder Days, but their readers turned that down. They wanted a sequel. But I wanted heroic legends and high romance. The result was The Lord of the Rings.

As a reader, I am grateful for the creation of The Lord of the Rings, but it’s always a little bit dispiriting to be reminded how often art must bend to the will of commerce if it’s to even exist.

I am not as obsessed with all the professor’s backstage undertakings as I once was. I’m completely satisfied with the LOTR’s appendices and Unfinished Tales. Long ago I decided I didn’t need all twelve volumes of The History of Middle-earth. I only bought this book because I’d read and loved The Children of Húrin. I had the mistaken understanding that Beren and Lúthien and The Fall of Gondolin were more like that. They are more literary excavations than coherent narratives.

This is a book for Tolkien completists. It has real value to anyone intrigued by how Middle-earth’s great romance grew from a fairy tale beginning to something worthy of 4200 + lines of poetry and more. Nonetheless, I am glad I read it and will read the succeeding volume about Gondolin one day. Still, it’s not a book I imagine ever reading in toto again.

Roads Go Ever Ever On

Some dwarf and JRR Tolkien by the Bros. Hildebrandt

With this essay, I’m bringing down the curtain on Half a Century of Reading Tolkien. Ten dedicated pieces and two related ones seem enough. There are notions floating about my brain for future work, but for now, I’ll let them rest and perhaps germinate into full-fledged ideas. I’m more than satisfied with what I’ve done here at Black Gate and reader’s responses. Some of the comments directly affected how I approached the professor’s work in succeeding articles.

I have enjoyed this undertaking immensely, as I hope many of you have. It’s pleasing to find that The Hobbit still brings me joy, and The Lord of the Rings and parts of The Silmarillion still move and thrill me. It was also exciting to bring more knowledge of history, Christianity, and myth to reading these works. That was important to developing a deeper understanding of what Prof. Tolkien was doing artistically and thematically. There’s great beauty in Tolkien and revisiting it has been a rewarding undertaking.

I definitely enjoyed the chance to revisit curiosities and side bits like the Rankin and Bass shows, the Ralph Bakshi movie, and Bored of the Rings. Even Terry Brooks’ The Sword of Shannara was more interesting coming so close upon the heels of rereading Tolkien.

For those who don’t remember, this entire project grew out of me hate-watching Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings movies (the expanded editions with even more things to hate-watch). I easily watched all three movies three times in the course of preparing for and writing the first four articles. Looking back a year or so, I stand by my dismissal of them and, even more so, by my complete disdain for the The Hobbit movies.

Last year, concerning those last three dreadful films, I wrote “I feel like I watched them for penance for any and all sins I’ve ever committed and will yet commit.” I watched them again after writing that and have concluded there are no sins I could still commit in my life that would ever make me deserve such punishment. Even Morgoth himself might offer me condolences for having seen them.

Let me leave you with some words from Christopher Tolkien from an interview in Le Monde. First, his opinion on the LOTR movies, “They eviscerated the book, making it an action film for 15-25 year olds.” More importantly, though, he added “The gap that has widened between the beauty, the seriousness of the work, and what it has become, all of this is beyond me. Such a degree of commercialization reduces the aesthetic and philosophical significance of this creation to nothing. I only have one solution left: turn my head.”

The books will remain. They are there for the reading any time. For as many times as I’ve read them, I imagine, well, hope, many more times remain.

Half a Century of Reading Tolkien: Part One

Half a Century of Reading Tolkien: Part Two – The Fellowship of the Ring by JRR Tolkien

Half a Century of Reading Tolkien: Part Three — The Two Towers by JRR Tolkien

Half a Century of Reading Tolkien: Part Four — The Return of the King by JRR Tolkien

Half a Century of Reading Tolkien: Part Five — From the Beginning: The Hobbit by JRR Tolkien

Half a Century of Reading Tolkien: Part Six — Bored of the Rings by Henry N. Beard & Douglas C. Kenney

Half a Century of Reading Tolkien: Part Seven — The Sword of Shannara by Terry Brooks

Half a Century of Reading Tolkien: Part Eight — The Silmarillion by JRR Tolkien

Half a Century of Reading Tolkien: Part Nine – Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, translated by JRR Tolkien

Grimmer Than Grim: The Children of Húrin by J.R.R. Tolkien

Talking Tolkien: Of Such a Sort Should a Man Be – Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary by J.R.R. Tolkien

Fletcher Vredenburgh writes a column each first Sunday of the month at Black Gate, mostly about older books he hasn’t read before. He also posts at his own site, Stuff I Like when his muse hits him

Deathstalker (New World Pictures, September 2, 1983)

A veritable cornucopia of dodgy barbarian and barbarian-adjacent movies that I have never watched before, and will probably never watch again.

Deathstalker (1983) – USA/Argentina

Inspired by a recent foray into the Conan the Cimmerian Barbarian: The Complete Weird Tales Omnibus, I suddenly had a hankering for more of the same, and so here we are.

Never one to miss an opportunity to cash in on a zeitgeist, Roger Corman saw the response to the the previous year’s Schwarzenegger grunt-a-thon and fast tracked this hokey slice of sword and sorcery, roping in sometime collaborator James Sbardellati to direct Howard R. Cohen’s cut and paste script.

Deathstalker (Rick Hill) is a wandering rogue fighter who loves nothing better than sticking his sword in people, literally and metaphorically speaking. He is quested by a witch to unearth a trio of macguffins in order to topple an evil sorcerer, Munkar (Bernard Erhard), and does so with the help of a diminutive goblin, a swarthy dude bro, and a female warrior whose idea of armour is a pair of knickers and a cloak.

Indeed, knockers and bum cheeks abound in this less than light-hearted romp, and the whole affair grows tiresome remarkably fast. Deathstalker himself isn’t even a fun anti-hero — the only time he is less than plank-like is when he’s sexually assaulting someone — leaving it very hard to root for him, let alone anyone, in this.

4/10

Deathstalker 2 (Concorde Pictures, September 12, 1987) Deathstalker 2 (1987) – USA/Argentina

Due to a multiple-picture deal with the Argentinian studios, and presumably some car payments, producer Roger Corman once again leaped into the Deathstalker world, still smarting that no one would let him make a Conan film. He roped in Jim Wynorski to direct, having just worked together on the altogether fab Chopping Mall (1986), and recast the titular lunk with John Terlesky.

Neil Ruttenberg’s script borrows heavily from an actual Robert E. Howard joint, the short story “A Witch Shall Be Born,” using the central premise of a kingdom overthrown by a doppelganger, and the usurped princess seeking the aid of a sword-swinging lothario.

This one (in an eventual series of three) is remembered quite fondly by sword and sandal enthusiasts, and that’s probably due to its more tongue-in-cheek nature, but this alone isn’t enough to save it. Yes, I enjoyed watching this one more than the first, but it’s still rubbish. Not only that but it pads out several scenes with footage from the first movie (Corman gripping those purse strings like a python in the temple of Set) and several scenes overstay their welcome, especially the Amazonian wrestling match.

It’s not all misery though, the two female leads, Monique Gabrielle in the dual role as the princess and her evil clone, and Maria Socas as the Amazon queen, are both really good and fun to watch. A female Deathstalker would have been excellent, but the 80s weren’t ready for that (don’t get me started on Red Sonja).

5/10

Deathstalker (Shout! Studios, October 10, 2025) Deathstalker (2025) – USA/Canada

Such is the nature of rose-tinted nostalgia goggles it was inevitable that an homage would be thrown together and quickly crowdfunded by a bunch of folk who remembered the kick-ass Boris Vallejo posters and copious tits of the 80s flicks. This remake is produced by Slash from Guns and Roses, and written and directed by Steven Kostanski, who made the excellent The Void (2016), and therefore got my hopes up.

In this version, Deathstalker (Daniel Bernhardt) loots a macguffin off a battlefield corpse and is instantly cursed with it. His witch friend tells him of a wizard who should be able to break the curse, and so begins his quest, which would ultimately be packed to the rafters with set-piece after set-piece.

Deathstalker teams up with said impish wizard, Doodad (voiced by Patton Oswald), and a feisty thief, Brisbayne (Christina Orjalo, very good). Together they go up against the demonic forces of Necromemnon and his lackey Jotak (Paul Lazenby), and much blood is spilled by all.

From the opening shot (a head is brutally removed from its owner in shocking close-up) I thought I was going to seriously enjoy this version, but as it progressed, and the humour took over, I started to find it more frustrating than enjoyable. This needed the Airplane treatment — instead of Deathstalker cracking gags, he needed to be absolutely straight-laced — let the lampoonary carry on around him.

That said, the production value is great for the budget and the gore is fantastic, so I did have some fun with it, just not as much as I had popped my corn for.

7/10

Masters of the Universe (The Cannon Group, August 7, 1987) Masters of the Universe (1987) – USA

Shockingly, I’ve never seen this dollop of American cheese-style product before, but I hardly knew the franchise, being British and 16 when the Filmation series first ran in 1983. Therefore I had no battlecat in the race and really wasn’t interested when the movie burst into cinemas (and flopped, contributing to the death of Cannon Films).

While doing a bit of digging (yes, I actually research these films after I’ve watched them and before I write this drivel), I learned that Mattel really hamstrung the production, which may have had a small part in its eventual dullness, but also, come on, all of Eternia to play with and the budget restricts three quarters of the film to the most deserted square mile of Whittier, California.

Storywise, Skeletor (Frank Langella, excellent) wants a macguffin invented by incredibly annoying, smashburger-faced Gwildor (Billy Barty), and when He-Man (Dolph Lungren, mercifully dubbed) gets accidentally transported to Earth, Skeletor sends his most inept commandos to hunt the device down and kill the blond bore. The macguffin, a portal-summoning synthesizer key, falls into the hands of Julie (Courtney Cox) and her undeserving boyfriend, Kevin (Robert Duncan McNeill), and a great many things get blown up with nary a single shocked reaction from the surrounding (missing) community.

Lots of chasing, cackling, and hair blowing in the wind ensues, but I fell asleep several times and had to keep rewinding it. Sorry to fans of this one.

6/10

The Barbarians (Cannon Releasing Corporation, March 20, 1987) The Barbarians (1987) – USA/Italy

A barbarian film from legendary horror-meister Ruggero (Cannibal Holocaust) Deodato? Sign me up! Is what I probably would have said in the late 80s, but being older now and suckered more times than I can remember, I didn’t go into this one with wild abandon. A wise decision as, despite Deodato’s frenetic direction and ability to squeeze every bit of sumptuousness from low-budget sets, the film is ultimately mind-numbing, and not in a good way.

On paper it should have worked; a classic sword and sorcery plot, Richard Lynch chewing the scenery, loin cloths and blood, but the film is hampered by terrible dialogue (and worse dubbing) and a pair of meatheads (David and Peter Paul as the titular Barbarian brothers) who pop veins and shout words with equal redundancy.

The story, which has its own macguffin in the form of a ruby, has a similar element to another film I’ll be reviewing next time (Iron Warrior) and throws forbidden lands, dragons, and torture at us in an attempt to distract us from the brothers, to no avail.

I know this reads like I disliked the film, but to be honest I actually had a fun time. It helped that Michael Berryman was wearing a headband with a single horn on it for much of the proceedings. What a good sport.

7/10

Previous Murky Movie surveys from Neil Baker include:

Probing Questions
My Top Thirty Films
The Star Warses
Just When You Thought It Was Safe
Tech Tok
The Weyland-Yutaniverse
Foreign Bodies
Mummy Issues
Ch-Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes
Monster Mayhem
It’s All Rather Hit-or-Mythos
You Can’t Handle the Tooth
Tubi Dive
What Possessed You?

See all of Neil Baker’s Black Gate film reviews here. Neil spends his days watching dodgy movies, most of them terrible, in the hope that you might be inspired to watch them too. He is often asked why he doesn’t watch ‘proper’ films, and he honestly doesn’t have a good answer. He is an author, illustrator, teacher, and sculptor of turtle exhibits.

Adventure, October 10, 1922

Some science fiction authors like to cloak their histories in mystery, not content to keep the fiction in their writing. Lester Del Rey claimed he was born Ramon Felipe Alvarez-del Rey and that his family was killed in a car crash, although his sister confirms his birth name was Leonard Knapp and the accident only killed his first wife. Nothing F. Gwynplaine MacIntyre said about himself should be trusted. Nictzin Dyalhis is another author who appeared to create his own history.

According to his draft registration card, he was born on June 4, 1873 in Massachusetts, although he also claimed to have been born in 1880 and 1879 and variously in England in Pima, Arizona. His draft registration is also the first time the name Nictzin Dyalhis appears. It also notes that he lost an eye in his childhood.

In 1912, he married Harriet Lord, who was committed to the Warren State Hospital in the late 1920s and died there in 1959. Her death certificate shows two interesting things. First, it claims her husband’s name was Fred, which could be Dyalhis’ birth name. Second, it lists her as a widow, indicating she was never divorced. Despite this, Dyalhis remarried by 1930, to Mary Sheddy, although in the 1930 census her name is given as Netulyani Dyalhis (and later claims that her birth name was Netulyani Del Torres). Nictzin and Mary had a daughter, Mary, in 1932.

The Sapphire Goddess: The Fantasies of Nictzin Dyalhis, Cover by Margaret Brundage

Just as there is a question about Dyalhis’ first name, there is also speculation that Dyalhis is a playful spelling of the name Dallas, although in Literary Swordsmen and Sorcerers, L. Sprague de Camp explains that his father was a Welshman whose last name was Dyahlis, who had a fascination with the Aztec, from whom the name Nictzin was taken.

It appears that Dyalhis tried his hand at various jobs, which isn’t surprising given that his literary output is limited to a baker’s dozen stories. When he visited Arizona in 1913 with Harriet, he appears to have been involved in mining or panning for gold. In 1920, he listed himself as working as a chemist. While living in Waynesboro, Pennsylvania in 1930, he listed his occupation as a machinist at a tool manufacturing plant. He also claims to have spent time in Asia, where he was introduced to the occult, which is often seen in his writing.

His first published story was “Who Keep the Desert Law,” published in the October 20, 1922 issue of Adventure. In April of 1925, his story “When the Green Star Waned” was published in Weird Tales, where the majority of his stories would appear. “When the Green Star Waned” has the distinction of being the first known reference to a ray gun as a “blastor.” His stories fit in well with the Weird Tales vibe and have the feel of authors like Clark Ashton Smith and August Derleth, offering heroes dealing with supernatural and occult forces which seem to be manifestations of the natural order of things.

Dyalhis died in Salisbury, Maryland on May 8, 1942. His first wife died in 1959 and his second wife in 1977.

Steven H Silver is a twenty-one-time Hugo Award nominee and was the publisher of the Hugo-nominated fanzine Argentus as well as the editor and publisher of ISFiC Press for eight years. He has also edited books for DAW, NESFA Press, and ZNB. His most recent anthology is Alternate Peace and his novel After Hastings was published in 2020. Steven has chaired the first Midwest Construction, Windycon three times, and the SFWA Nebula Conference numerous times. He was programming chair for Chicon 2000 and Vice Chair of Chicon 7.

Strong Poison, by Dorothy Sayers (Avon Books #328, 1951)

In Strong Poison, Sayers gives Peter Wimsey a love interest, and makes this central to the story. Traditional mystery writers had avoided this kind of plot (Irene Adler, for example, was clearly not romantically involved with Sherlock Holmes, however profound an impression she made on him).

Not all of her readers welcomed the innovation. In particular, Harriet Vane, a successful author of detective stories, was sometimes looked at as what fan fiction readers now call a “self-insertion” by Sayers — a view that gains plausibility from Vane’s involvement in a love affair, given what we know now about Sayers’s life story.

We first meet Vane in a courtroom, where she is being tried for the murder of her former lover, Philip Boyes, a less successful but more artistically pretentious novelist (what little is said of his books suggests Aldous Huxley’s early novels, before Brave New World made him immortal).

[Click the images for stronger versions.]

Strong Poison (Brewer and Warren, 1930)

Boyes died of arsenic poisoning, and Vane had bought arsenic twice in the time leading up to his death, and had seen him the night he died, so the circumstantial evidence looks damning.

Sayers has the judge sum up the testimony for the jury and advise them as to what points they need to decide, a handy device for exposition. The jury is out for a long time, from just after lunch till well into the evening, and finally ends up hung, nine to three.

One of the three is Wimsey’s ally Miss Climpson (introduced in Unnatural Death), who holds out against a lot of pressure from the foreman and most of the other jurors, saying that the prisoner’s demeanor is part of the evidence and Vane’s demeanor isn’t that of a murderer.

Strong Poison (Tower, 1945)

Wimsey himself, who apparently has been in the audience throughout the trial, seems to have reached the same conclusion; he’s convinced enough of Vane’s innocence to criticize her solicitor for treating this as a job of casting doubt on her guilt. But at the same time, he has decided to marry Vane, having fallen in love with her. He says as much to her when he first interviews her in prison, and is taken aback when she says, “Oh, are you another of them? That makes forty-seven.”

Wimsey’s closest friend, Charles Parker, makes an appearance, in two roles. On one hand, he’s initially convinced that Vane is guilty, though he provides Wimsey with help in looking for evidence to the contrary.

Strong Poison (Pocket Books, 1945)

On the other, he and Wimsey’s sister Mary have fallen in love with each other, and the issues of social class this raises parallel those between Wimsey and Vane neatly; their older brother, the Duke of Denver, is horrified at both prospects.

The use of arsenic makes this another mystery that turns on medical knowledge — or, in this case, on medical folklore. Once again, Sayers focuses less on who than on how.

Strong Poison (Avon Books, 1969)

When Wimsey has his manservant Bunter put away some books he’s been consulting, one of which is A Shropshire Lad, I recognized, and so (to his credit) did Bunter, that this was a reference to the poem “Epilogue” (or “Terence, This Is Stupid Stuff”), which ends with the legend of Mithridates:

There was a king reigned in the East.
There, when kings will sit to feast,
They get their fill before they think
With poisoned meat and poisoned drink . . .

Strong Poison (Harper & Row paperback edition)

In fact, this is a book filled with quotations and allusions; and the exchange of both between Wimsey and Vane is one of the first signs that they might actually belong together. The poem neatly hints at the method (which is one that is no longer thought to be workable) and at how Wimsey proves his case.

Beyond how, there’s also why: the motive for the crime. And here, as in Unnatural Death (and An Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, which came in between), family history and financial assets come into the story.

Strong Poison (HarperCollins, 1987)

Both Boyes and his cousin Norman Urquhardt, a solicitor, with whom he dined on the night of his death, have family connections to Rosanna Wrayburn (née Hubbard), a famous actress of the 1860s who led a scandalous life, under the stage name of Cremorna Garden, and invested the many gifts it brought her, making her wealthy in her old age. Sayers seems to like stories about women who rebelled against Victorian expectations in various ways!

Wimsey gets together with Miss Climpson early in the investigation and discusses possible motives with her; and later he calls on both her and another woman in his agency, Miss Murchison, to investigate various aspects of the case. In Miss Climpson’s case that involves her playing the role of a spirit medium for Mrs. Wrayburn’s credulous nurse (a great bit of comic relief!); Miss Murchison gets lessons in lockpicking from a former burglar, Bill Rumm, who reformed and got religion after an earlier encounter with Wimsey.

Dorothy L. Sayers Mysteries adaptations featuring Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane:
Strong Poison, Have His Carcase, and Gaudy Night (BBC Video, 2002)

Knowing why gives Wimsey confirmation of who. There are also connections with the Megatherium Trust (named for the giant ground sloth!), on which Wimsey gets helpful advice from his friend Freddy Arbuthnot — who has just become engaged to Rachel Levy, the daughter of the murder victim in Whose Body?, another matrimonial crossing of established social boundaries.

We also see Wimsey consulting with Marjorie Phelps, an artist who makes porcelain figures, for a better understanding of Vane’s cultural milieu. In particular, she introduces him to Vane’s friends Sylvia Marriott and Eiluned Price, who give him more background on Vane’s relationship with Boyes.

Strong Poison (Hodder & Stoughton/Coronet Crime trade paperback, 1993)

Price is characterized as generally disliking men, which might or might not be a hint about her sexuality, but at the end of the novel she tells Vane that Wimsey is too decent to be importunate in his courtship, so it seems he managed to make a good impression on her.

The chapter where Wimsey talks with the three women doesn’t seem to advance his investigation much; its function seems to be more one of characterization — notably Phelps’s silent unhappiness at the end, which hints at something unspoken between her and Wimsey.

Strong Poison (Harper Paperbacks, 2012)

On one hand, I can’t regret the introduction of Harriet Vane into the series; she will play a significant role in some of the later novels, and even in this one her characterization is interesting.

On the other, while it’s in character for Wimsey to decide she’s innocent and take up investigating her case, it seems implausible for him to fall in love with her after having merely seen her in the witness box in a courtroom. I feel as if Sayers didn’t feel able to show the beginning of the attraction convincingly and fell back on making it a fait accompli.

And Wimsey’s declaration of his feelings during his first interview with Vane is awkward in a way that’s hard to believe of a man of such suavity. The events of Strong Poison are central to the series, but they make me wonder if the story Sayers was telling had gotten out of her control. So I can understand why some of her readers may have thought this particular storyline was ill-advised.

Strong Poison by Dorothy L Sayers (Four Square UK edition, 1960)

On the other hand, Sayers’s fusion of a murder mystery with a novel about courtship and social class certainly breaks the series out of any previously established formula, which is part of what makes it interesting.

“Forgive my asking, but — you were very fond of Philip Boyes?”
“I must have been, mustn’t I — under the circumstances?”
“Not necessarily,” said Wimsey, boldly, “you might have been sorry for him — or bewitched by him — or even badgered to death by him.”
“All those things.”

William H. Stoddard is a professional copy editor specializing in scholarly and scientific publications. As a secondary career, he has written more than two dozen books for Steve Jackson Games, starting in 2000 with GURPS Steampunk. He lives in Lawrence, Kansas with his wife, their cat (a ginger tabby), and a hundred shelf feet of books, including large amounts of science fiction, fantasy, and graphic novels.